The Good, the Bad and the Oyster
Scene: The old West, somewhere near Galveston
Cast: Festus and Marshal Matt Dillon
Festus: I’m tellin’ ya’, Matthew, that Bozka feller is just plain yeller.
Matt: Hold on, Festus. Don’t be too hard on the boy. Could be he just ate a bad oyster.
It was not a dream. It was a nightmare.
This is a hospital, and I’m in it. No one is with me.
The lights are out. There are no interruptions, except for the occasional rubber-gloved nurse and random blabbering about sick and dying people on the hospital intercom.
I am not dead. Not yet, anyway.
I am now the proud owner of three beautiful diffenbachias, the only verifiable signs of outside life on the fourth floor. Ah, yes, the Great Outdoors. Somewhere else in the world, about right now, an alarm clock is ringing and some lucky SOB is going fishing.
Not me. I’m watching Gunsmoke.
It’s 3 a.m. My eyes are as yellow as the lemons on a Reno slot machine. Skin, too. My liver’s been shut down for four days, I’ve had a fever for five and my blood’s thinner’n hospital brewed chicken broth.
Every hour or two, the nurses check in on me to make sure all this poison in my body hasn’t made me plumb crazy. No kidding … doctor’s orders. So far, I have been acceptably disoriented … best as I can remember, anyway. 
All this because of an oyster the size of my thumbnail.
Oh, no. Miss Kitty is all upset.
Bear in mind here, it takes quite a bit to make Miss Kitty upset. Bet if she was running the Long Branch Saloon today, she wouldn’t take a chance on serving anyone oysters … or, for that matter, eating them.
But it’s bad guys, not oysters, who are Kitty’s dilemma. They want to kill her. But, of course, they won’t. Matt won’t let them. Hepatitis wants to kill me, and perhaps it will. Miss Kitty and I, unfortunately, have different scriptwriters.
Too bad Marshal Dillon isn’t around today, checking the reefs for bad bivalves and arresting oyster rustlers. If only things were the way they used to be.
Used to be, around the deer camp in Vienna (just a few miles away from Speaks on FM 530 southeast of Hallettsville), no one worried about the ceremonial eating of raw oysters on every opening weekend of deer season. You wouldn’t catch those guys in a sushi bar to save their lives, but they’d pull fresh oysters out of a wet tow sack, shuck ‘em and devour ‘em with the ferocious demeanor of a trout school tearing into a cornered pod of jumbo shrimp.
I don’t recall that anyone ever got ahold of a bad one.
There is no mistaking a bad oyster. A bad oyster is rank, vile and disgusting. It ruins your whole day.
And then, if you’re really snakebit, it comes back a few weeks later and ruins your next few months. Makes it hell for your family, too, especially if being upright and functional is critical to daily operations. They tell me their shots weren’t any fun, either; thank God no one caught it from me.
It’s a fact that this city is not an especially healthy place in which to live. Eating, drinking and breathing have become far too dangerous.
Outside my window in Houston’s medical complex, I see a haze cloaked sky that’s little more than an open receptacle for automobile exhaust, industrial wastes and ozone eating freon. Below, water runoff carries countless other toxins … things like lawn chemicals, pesticides, discarded oil changes and, of course, fecal coliform.
”Human waste,” if you will. The kind that gave me this stinking disease.
Come to think of it, one bad oyster could’ve easily destroyed the Old West. Marshal Dillon would’ve been put out of commission more than long enough for Dodge City to completely return to chaotic and bloody lawlessness.
Good thing, then, that today we have laws that regulate the harvesting of oysters. Too bad there are also people who break them.
The lawmakers in Austin got mad about it last year (1989), so they beefed up the penalties. People who take oysters from polluted water at night, for example, can now get up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine for their first offense.
I say they ought to get two weeks in this matchbox of a room, eating nothing but synthetic, no cholesterol/no salt/no sugar/no flavor hospital food while being forced to watch loud and continuous reruns of the Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island, Petticoat Junction and The Munsters.
Whew.
Amazing how getting it off your chest makes you feel better. Besides, in some ways things are actually looking up … like, for instance, the movies. The Cold War is out and the environment is in.
Hollywood is out to save the earth, to halt air and water pollution, to unveil the desperate plight of irreplaceable and precious things like mountain gorillas and Brazilian rain forests and, maybe someday, tainted oyster reefs and the yellow-eyed people who know them for the deadly threat they are.
Now if only Matt could figure out how to save Miss Kitty.
Why This Story Merits Resurrection
I wrote this piece for the CCA’s TIDE Magazine back in March of 1990, and it has been sitting in the archives ever since.
It came to mind, however, last Friday (March 7) when I received an advisory from the Texas Department of State Health regarding three-day shellfish harvest closures on Aransas, Corpus Christi and Copano Bays. Shellfish harvested from these bays on or after March 1 are currently being recalled, and consumers are being (obviously) advised to not eat them and to call the store where their shellfish were purchased to determine the date and location of harvest, and if necessary, dispose of them.
The culprit in this case is high concentrations of the Dinophysis organism in the bay’s oysters, clams and mussels. That organism produces algae blooms, in this case, one best known as “brown tide.” Such blooms create a toxin, okadaic acid, that can accumulate in shellfish tissue and cause diarrhetic shellfish poisoning, or “DSP,” in people who consume affected oysters, clams and mussels. The toxin does not affect other forms of seafood, but it’s important to note that cooking does not destroy it.
Dinophysis occurs naturally in ocean waters and is not, according to experts, related to pollution. Though miserable, DSP-related ailments last two to three days and can begin from 30 minutes to 12 hours after consumption of the affected shellfish. DSP is usually not life threatening, and does not generally cause long-term effects. DPS symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, nausea and cramping.
According to the press release, DSHS officials say that preliminary test results indicated that levels of okadaic acid in oyster samples taken from the aforementioned Coastal Bend bays exceeded federal guidelines. Final test results will be available later this week, and DSHS will monitor and determine when it is safe to reopen the shellfish areas. So far, state health officials have yet to learn of any illnesses associated with this algae bloom.
Again, algae blooms are part of Mother Nature’s plan, devious and destructive as they may seem (just ask anyone who suffered the prolonged brown tide infestations that in the past bred so much misery on Baffin Bay and the Lower Laguna Madre).
The oyster that got me, however, was not Mother Nature’s doing … not the toxic part, anyway. As you read above, I contracted Hepatitis A from an oyster that, for lack of a better way of putting it, had enjoyed a generous helping of raw sewage for lunch.
If there is anything “lucky” about Hep A, it’s that unlike other forms of hepatitis, it does not leave permanent organ damage. It does, though, all but shut down your liver functions, leaving your body thoroughly permeated with toxins and so poisonously weak that it’s difficult to reach for a bottle of water sitting on a table by the bed.
Unfortunately, having been there, I know way too much about this ailment. The only good thing that came of it was the opportunity to write this story while I was still in the hospital. Though penned 18 years ago, it carries continued relevance to anyone who takes a chance with raw oysters.
Make no mistake; when you eat raw oysters, especially late in the season (as in “right now”), you are doing just that.
Here’s hoping you will never have to experience the ramifications firsthand.
Keep your line wet and your powder dry.
Boz
Howdy. I am 
