Anita freaking Brikman and my brush with death

Being a semi-part-time vegetarian, I'm always on the lookout for good fake chicken nuggets. I was at a Whole Foodsy kind of supermarket once with my little niece and found a package of (to avoid legal entanglements we'll call them) Apex brand fake chicken nuggets. No chickens were harmed in the making of these nuggets. I was game. I took them home.

I fried them up in butter, because, let's face it, most fake foods taste like shoe leather without some doctoring. I offered my niece some, but she declined.

I eat them, they weren't bad, and not ten minutes later, Anita freaking Brikman, then the health reporter on Action News, comes on my TV and says, "A consumer activist group in England is demanding the recall of Apex brand fake chicken nuggets because in England there are reports of vomiting, projectile diarrhea, and for the lucky ones, death!"

Could she not tell me this a week earlier? Could she not tell me this a week later? No, she waits for ten minutes after I ate them.

Crap! I started freaking out. My niece thought all of this was very funny. I call my wife, a nurse, and she was like, "Well how do you feel?"

"Fine, except I'm freaking out!"

She took a poll of the other nurses, who recommended some Pepto Bismol. I took off to the drug store, and drove back home swilling PB from the bottle.

Got back, got online. First  I found the Apex website, that said, "You might have heard some nasty stories about our fake chicken nuggets. They are not true!"

Then I went to the anti-Apex website that said, "They're lying, the bodies here are piling up!" And at the bottom of their homepage, instead of a visitors counter, the counter ticked off the death count.

And then...I lived.

Further research revealed that a mystery ingredient in the fake chicken nuggets was mushrooms, and someone  with allergies to mushrooms who ate the fake chicken nuggets would be playing a culinary variation of Russian roulette.

The moral of the story of course is I should have had a cheesesteak.