Bad Water & the Flux

Cholera. It empties you from both ends within hours until what comes up is rice water, and by nightfall your eyes have sunk, your skin has gone grey-blue, and your voice is a whisper from a dry well. The doctor fights with salt water by the spoonful and brandy by the drop, and the camp digs a fire pit for your bedding either way.

• Hollowed and barely conscious, hours matter, not days
• Skin gone bluish, eyes sunken, a face people flinch from
• If the salt water holds you, 7 days too weak to walk unaided
• /me whispers for water through cracked lips, plucking weakly at the soaked blanket

Recovery It kills in a day or spares you for 7 of them, spoonful by spoonful decides which.·Doctor, urgently

The bulged tin's revenge arrives a day late and strange: your eyelids droop, the lamplight doubles, and your arms hang heavy as wet rope. The doctor has read of this, ptomaine paralysis, and can only purge, watch, and wait. On the third day the creep stops just short of your breathing, and then, slowly, retreats.

• Drooping lids and doubled vision, 3 days of the world in twos
• Too weak to grip, ride, or shoot for 5 days
• Fed and tended like a newborn during the worst of it
• /me tries to raise a cup with both hands, arms trembling under the weight of tin

Recovery 7 days as the stillness lets go from the toes up, it stopped one rung short of the lungs.·Doctor, urgently

Dysentery, the full sentence: gripping cramps, fever, and a flux gone bloody, marching you to the bushes until you're too weak to march. The doctor prescribes the era's whole arsenal, laudanum to slow the gut, bismuth to coat it, salt broth to refill you, and absolute rest, which for once you don't argue with.

• Bedridden 4 days within staggering distance of the latrine
• Laudanum-dosed, slow, dreamy, and useless after each spoonful
• A haunted, hollowed look that takes 7 days to fill back in

Recovery 6 days with dosing and broth, untreated it wrings you dry a week longer.·Doctor required

It hit you hardest and first, violent purging that looks enough like cholera that the doctor won't gamble. You're moved to a tent apart, your dishes are boiled or burned, and the whole camp is ordered onto boiled water while they watch you for the blue skin that means the worst. It never comes, but the week is long.

• Quarantined apart for 3 days, conversations held at ten paces
• Weak and wrung out for 4 days
• The boil-water order is enforced in your name, the camp grumbles it at you
• /me calls the day's news across the quarantine line, voice thin but working

Recovery 5 days to strength, 3 to freedom, the doc lifts quarantine with visible relief.·Doctor required

Six hours after the communal stew, your body declares its verdict: violent, heaving rejection of everything you've eaten since roughly childhood. Half the camp is folded over alongside you, which is company but not comfort. Bismuth, sips of salt water, and a long ugly night.

• One catastrophic night, the sound effects are yours to perform
• Wrung out and hollow the next 2 days, broth only
• Everyone who ate from the pot compares symptoms competitively

Recovery 3 days from heaving to whole, the stew gets a trial in absentia.·Doctor required

The camp disease of every cattle drive: cramping flux that sends you to the bushes ten times an hour with your belt already unbuckled by the fifth. There's no dignity in it and no hiding it, only endurance, bismuth, and the hope that laudanum slows the gut before the gut wears out the trail.

• Constant urgent trips for 2 days, excuse yourself mid-scene, repeatedly
• Raw, cramping misery, walk carefully and sit slower
• Broth and boiled water only for 3 days
• /me returns from the bushes for the ninth time, buckling up with the thousand-yard stare of the flux veteran

Recovery 4 days with dosing, the indignity heals last.·Doctor required

Whatever was in that water has your gut in waves of cramps that double you over mid-stride, gripping, twisting seizures of the belly that come every quarter hour like contractions. Laudanum drops in water take the wire out of them by evening, but the echo aches for days.

• Doubling over at intervals for 2 days, conversations get paused
• Laudanum-slowed and drowsy in the evenings
• Tender-bellied for 3 days, no brawling, no heavy lifting

Recovery 4 days from wire to ache to gone.·Doctor required

The tinned oysters were bulged and you ate them anyway, because they were oysters and you are you. Hours later comes the fever, the sweats, and a purging that feels personal. Two days of bismuth and regret follow, during which you compose several speeches about tinned goods you'll never deliver.

• Feverish and purging for 2 days
• Swear off tins loudly, then get caught eyeing one within the week
• Weak and sour-stomached a day after, broth and crackers

Recovery 3 days, the last tin in your kit gets buried with ceremony.·Doctor required

The well everyone swore by has turned on you: a day and a half of gripes, grumbles, and urgent excursions. The camp debates the well's guilt like a jury while you serve as the evidence. Boiled water and bland food set you right.

• Urgent excursions for 1 day, time your scenes around them
• Gut audibly complaining for 2 days, it gets remarked on
• On the boiled-water regimen with visible resentment

Recovery 2 days of blandness and boiling.·Doctor advised

Nothing stays down from breakfast till dusk, not coffee, not crackers, not your pride. You spend the day the color of a spring pond, waving off food and keeping to the shade. By the second morning your stomach signs the truce.

• A full day unable to keep food down
• Visibly green, people offer remedies you can't keep down either
• Weak and careful eating for 1 day after

Recovery 2 days, the first one lost entirely.·Doctor advised

Your gut has opinions and shares them with the whole camp, audible rumbles, sudden cramps, and a relationship with the latrine that borders on courtship. Nothing grave, everything undignified. Bismuth and bland food for two days settles the argument.

• Gut noises audible across a quiet room for 2 days, acknowledge them
• Sudden wincing cramps at the worst possible moments
• Rich food and whiskey off the menu for 2 days

Recovery 2 days of blandness.·Doctor advised

Urgent, frequent, and absolutely unwilling to negotiate: for a day and a half you learn the location of every bush, gully, and outhouse within a quarter mile, and rank them by sprint time. The camp starts timing you. Your best is forty seconds, and you're not proud of knowing that.

• Frequent urgent dashes for 2 days, exit scenes at speed
• The camp keeps a betting book on your times, you've seen it
• Bland food and boiled water till it settles

Recovery 2 days and the trots move on to their next victim.·Doctor advised

The purging was short but it took your strength with it on the way out. For two days you're wobbly-kneed and easily winded, propped in the shade with salt broth while your body refills like a slow cistern.

• Winded by light work for 2 days
• Salt broth on a schedule, administered by whoever's bossiest
• A shaky hand that spills the first coffee of the morning

Recovery 3 days to full strength, broth willing.·Doctor advised

Supper betrays you around midnight and the argument lasts till nearly dawn, but by noon you're upright, hollow, and cautiously victorious, eating dry biscuit like it's a peace treaty.

• One loud, miserable night
• Delicate appetite for 1 day
• You glare at the leftover stew until someone buries it

Recovery A day, sleep included.·No doctor needed

Not sick, exactly, delicate. You turn down the beans with the face of a man declining a duel, keep to coffee and crackers, and flinch at the smell of frying fat. By supper you're eyeing the pot again.

• Off your feed till evening, decline food theatrically
• The camp finds your delicacy hilarious and says so
• Fully restored by supper

Recovery A day of crackers does it.·No doctor needed

Two bites in, a sulfurous burp rises like a warning flare and you set the plate down. Whatever was starting in that tin never got its boots on. You spend the evening burping brimstone and accepting congratulations on your reflexes.

• Sulfurous burps all evening, unmistakable at close range
• A wary gut for 1 day, you eat only what you watched cooked
• Your plate-drop reflex becomes teaching material

Recovery Overnight, the burps outlast the danger.·No doctor needed

One violent, clarifying hour behind the big cottonwood and it's done, whatever it was wanted out, not in. You walk back to camp lighter in every sense, appetite already returning, and finish supper as if nothing happened.

• One dramatic hour, then done
• A slightly gingerly walk back into camp
• Appetite back by supper, eat carefully anyway, for show

Recovery Done by supper.·No doctor needed

The same pot flattened three grown men and a dog, and all it got from you was one thoughtful cramp and a raised eyebrow. You spend the evening fetching basins for the fallen and accepting awed glances at your cast-iron constitution.

• One cramp, then legend status
• Drafted into nursing the less fortunate for a day
• Your gut is toasted by name at the next meal

Recovery Nothing to recover, you're the infirmary staff now.·No doctor needed

You'd been drinking whiskey instead of water for two days, laziness, mostly, and it turns out the well was poison and the bottle was salvation. Every water-drinker in camp is groaning in their bedroll while you stand untouched, living proof of the worst medical advice ever vindicated.

• Untouched while the camp suffers, insufferable about it
• You cite 'the whiskey defense' as medical doctrine for weeks
• Drafted to haul boiled water for the afflicted

Recovery Nothing, though the doc begs you not to draw the obvious conclusion.·No doctor needed

Your gut recognized the poison before your brain finished chewing, one convulsive, instantaneous rejection, right there at the fire, before a single drop got past the gate. The doc calls it the fastest reflex he's seen outside a gunfight. While the rest of the pot's victims moan in their rolls, you're on your feet all night hauling water, spooning broth, and building the legend of the gut that would not be fooled.

• Utterly fine within the hour, your reflex saved you the whole ordeal
• The camp's only able-bodied nurse for the night, bank the goodwill
• The story grows a little every telling and you let it
• /me ladles broth down the row of groaning bedrolls, humming, untouched by the plague they share

Recovery An hour of indignity traded for a week of everyone else's.·No doctor needed