Normally, I have a cast iron stomach. Nothing affects it; it goes about its business quietly, with nary a complaint. This week it revolted. I have since realized that not only am I submerged in error, I also end up eating my errors.

To isolate the cause of the tummy trouble, I began eliminating different diet items. The immediate suspect was a fresh head of green lettuce. Lettuce sometimes departs the fields with bacteria that is not completely removed. If my own leaf washing was perfunctory, or inexpertly done, then this bacterial residue would likely result in stomach problems and all the associated unpleasantness. It was not the lettuce.

The next likely culprit was a loaf of freshly purchased bread which had developed mould spots within a day of arriving home. The bread was not the culprit.

I eliminated a variety of other foodstuffs. The only remaining possible cause was a frozen food item, something that had been in the freezer for an extended period of time. It was being saved for a special occasion. I had decided to eat it now in a vain attempt to cheer myself up.

There was no way to determine how long the item had been in the freezer. It is entirely possible it sat in frozen storage for years before the accident. Perhaps it had partially thawed as it was being transported home in a hot car. Perhaps this resulted in spoilage that halted once I arrived home but which was then reactivated on reheating. It is impossible to write the true history of the item. It became clear this food item was strongly implicated in my illness.

But then there was a further realization. There were multiple items in the fridge unknown to me, items secreted for who knows how long. Some are specialized condiments purchased well prior to the accident. They have sat untouched for three years. Bottles of salad dressing. Tins of curry paste. Items with use before dates from several years ago. After the injury my diet altered. My focus switched from complex and challenging cuisine to simple, easy to prepare, yet nutritious foods. Largely vegetables. Typically steamed. Cooked in a one pot set up with a steamer basket arrangement that made for easy cooking and minimal clean-up. The exotic foodstuffs were forgotten, and left untouched.

The exotica languished in the fridge until I began my archaeological dig and rediscovered relics from a forgotten culinary past. What was found was not pretty. Some of it was very colourful. One or two items were borderline explosive. All now head for the waste bin. I have a new task list item which demands a review and purge of all stored canned and dry goods. Much of this will have been left untouched for the past three years.

I recognize I have a problem with time intervals. A leftover will be placed in the fridge and I will then err and make the false assumption it has been held for days when in fact the interval is weeks, or months. The same problem occurs with fresh produce. I cringe at the thought of searching for the zucchini I bought “only a few days ago.” When found it was a plastic bag of melted vegetable goo.

One solution is the use of a magic marker to date stamp everything that comes into the kitchen. I have not yet come up with a good way to handle leftovers.

As spring cleaning continues, I encounter areas of my domicile left untouched since the accident. In these unlived spaces, I have found a trove of work documents relevant to the accident claim; I had no memory of these and at first failed to realize their import. I stored summer tires at the local service centre, but never collected them. They are now gone and I am out of pocket the roughly $500 resale value. Papers from a self directed RRSP indicate a loss in the region of $20,000 when I failed to monitor my retirement funds following the accident.

But the worst experience comes from going through papers, and documents, and artifacts, and confronting the old me, the person who was vitally involved with all of these dead elements, the person who understood their relevance and import, who utilized them, and incorporated them into his life in some way. All these artifacts are now foreign and distant, a frozen set of mistakes difficult to acknowledge, strange clues to the person that I once may have been.