Cheese Baby

Cheese and I go way back. I've always loved cheese, probably more than a normal person should. There's a reason this is called "Cheese Baby", and that story is one of the first ones I tell people when they meet me. So here it is. I was 14 years old, and at that stage where you can stuff your face all day and not gain an ounce. My mom used to get me whatever food I wanted. She would buy the frozen mozzarella sticks that I absolutely LOVED. A stick of cheese battered and fried in grease...what's not to love?! I had them for dinner one Thursday night, went to school the next day and ate them again at lunch. That night was the high school football game and I went out to eat at Denny's after the game. If you've ever gotten their sampler platter you know how awesome it is. And you also know that it includes mozzarella sticks. Like I said, I love cheese.

Anyway, the next day I woke up and felt like I was dying. I couldn't even stand up, I just laid on the floor and cried. My parents scooped me up and ran me to the emergency room. I was screaming in pain. After talking with my parents, the doctors figured out that I probably had something wrong with my stomach or intestines.

They gave me a sonogram like I was pregnant, and discovered that there was a ball of cheese stuck in my stomach. CHEESE. It was HUGE. I got to see it on the screen, like it was my little cheese baby. It was completely disgusting. And too big to fit into my intestines. That's what you get for eating 22 cheese sticks in a 24 hour period of time. They pumped me full of morphine and had me hang out in the hospital all weekend while they figured out how to get rid of it. Morphine is an amazing drug, to which I am forever grateful. I got to spend two days mumbling "more drugs" and "cheese baby" to anyone who would listen. I can't even finish the story, I think I've blocked the rest out of my subconscious, because I have no idea how they got the cheese out and I've never wanted to ask.

So that's my cheese baby story. My love of cheese has only grown from there. Although I've never been able to eat a fried mozzarella stick again.