It’s January 2012. I’m the keynote speaker at the Canadian University Press’s annual NASH conference. A few hundred student journalists gathered together at a hotel in Victoria, B.C., for a couple of days of community. My speech is scheduled for after dinner on the last night.
Because I’m an idiot, I kind of scrap my prepared remarks and just start telling stories. (WHAT A SURPRISE.) I get some laughs, so I get braver. I start randomly talking about the time I spent a month riding along with paramedics, and all the gross, crazy shit I saw.
I talk about the teenager screaming through his testicular torsion. About the guy in the cement mixer. About the college students who thought you did the Century Club with alcohol instead of beer and nearly drowned in their own vomit. (They did 33 shots of vodka in 33 minutes!)
Well, kids start leaving. First one or two. Then they start exiting in bunches, in a hurry. They are literally running out of the room. I’m like, “Jones, you’re losing them!” I dial back to some more appropriate post-dinner talk, but it’s too late. A quarter of the room is gone.
There is a dance after. Someone asks me if I’m going, but I’m bummed by my failure of a talk, and besides, I don’t want to feel like a narc. Also, my then-wife is there and wants to call it a night. Buses drive the students away to the reception. I sulk around the lobby.
Minutes later, word comes that someone has thrown up on someone else on the bus. Then someone blew chunks in the middle of their signature dance move. A kid runs in. “THERE’S PUKING ON THE DANCEFLOOR” he yells, like he’s watching the Hindenburg go down. Born reporter.
I’m like, Kids these days, and head up to bed. I'm sound asleep when the phone rings. I get up and answer. It’s the conference organizer, asking if I feel okay. A lot of people are getting sick, and it started at my talk. “No, I’m totally fine.” Great, he says. Good night.
I go back to bed and discover that in my sleep I have shit in it. Unlike when I shit the bed with my dad in Hong Kong*, I wake my ex: “Honey, I shit the bed.” (The bed shitting isn’t why she divorced me, but it probably didn’t help.) All of a sudden, I feel my stomach turn.
I BOLT to the bathroom. Projectile vomit, I swear to God, ten feet into the toilet. And then, still running, and pirouetting like a fat ballerina, I turn my ass toward the same toilet and projectile shit from well behind the arc. It is the most athletic thing I’ve ever done. 
My body announces that everything else inside of it is coming out. I get in the tub, turn on the shower, and spend 20 minutes puking and shitting until my soul was like, I might as well get out of here, too. I swear I saw it leave my body.
After, I felt like one of those little packets of ketchup after it’s been squeezed empty. I call back the organizer. “Hey buddy, I actually was pretty sick. But I’m okay now.” No joke, I hear moaning in the hallway. A zombie apocalypse is taking place outside my door.
Long story short, the conference got hit by the Norwalk virus—traced to a serving spoon on the buffet. If you ate the scalloped potatoes or whatever, you got sick. If you didn’t, you didn’t. Of course, I did. By the next day, that entire hotel was like a crime scene.
There was puke in the elevators. Puke in the lobby. Puke all over the walls. There was a big potted plant that had puke in it. Because it was student journalists affected, the story went national. The one below has a quote from a kid named Brennan Bova.
cbc.ca/news/canada/br…
cbc.ca/news/canada/br…
“First it was just one guy who threw up on the back of my head, so for a while I was angry at him. Then I found out everyone else was throwing up as well.” I love that quote, because Brennan was like, Oh, so it’s not just you, little dude. All good that you PUKED ON MY HEAD.
I went back to that conference for years after—so often the kids started calling me NASH Dad, which was nice. I always told the story of that first year, when I thought I shit the bed with my speech, but instead truly, actually shit the bed. No, not that time. The other time.
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