I’m Feeling Sick and Have the Runs

I am sick and have the runs,

and I am going tons and tons.

Enough with all the splash and plop!

Please, Dr. Jo, when will this stop?

You caught a bug, or food you ate

brought in some germs that irritate

your stomach, small, or large intestine,

messing with your food digestion.

The process of digestion’s slow,

enough to give food time to go

through many different steps, till it’s

split up to form small, useful bits.

The stomach uses hours of time

to break food into soupy chyme.

The small intestine is slow too,

with hours of breakdown it must do.

The small intestine sends its waste—

a brown and very soupy paste—

into the large intestine, which

pulls water from the goopy mix.

But germs cause organs to react,

so very quickly, they contract.

This pushes food out much too fast

so that it comes through in a blast,

and there’s no time for water to

get pulled out as the wastes pass through.

So your intestine stretches wide

as waste plus water builds inside.

This extra stretch will then create

an urgent need to defecate.

This is a reflex; it’s so strong

that you can’t hold it in for long.

What comes out is a soupy brew

with undigested food mixed through,

and lots of water in there too.

All this comes pouring out of you.

To replace water, do it right:

get drinks that have electrolytes,

like juices, broths, and sports drinks that

will help you get that water back.

As you recover, things will slow,

until you only have to go

just once or twice a day, and you

will feel a whole lot better, too.

COOL FACTS ABOUT DIARRHEA

• Diarrhea is a powerful weapon for some animals. With just one squirt, a tiny hoopoe bird chick can stop an invader in its tracks. The antipredator juice is a liquid feces that the little chicks shoot out of their rear ends. A face full of feces is a pretty strong warning to any predator that is thinking of attacking the nest!
• Bird droppings are thick and goopy—more like our diarrhea than the solid chunks we normally defecate. The reason for this is that bird droppings are a mix of both solid wastes and urine. Birds release everything out of one hole, the cloaca. So the mix that comes out as a big white splat has both solid and liquid all together. Humans, on the other hand, release these separately: liquid urine comes from our kidneys and leaves through a passage called the urethra, while solids from our large intestine leave through the anus.