Guess I better go to the doctor

So for a long time, my favourite Indian restaurant in Vancouver has been a hole-in-the-wall on Granville Street called Crave India. The food is spicy, cheap, and tasty, and the naan fresh and perfect. There used to be a very likeable counterman, too, though I haven't seen him in awhile - he seems to have been replaced by a kid with very limited English skills. But the cook is the same. The place is nothing fancy but for a curry lover the quality and price are fantastic; most of the friends I've taken there have agreed.

I won't be going back there, alas, since a bad experience last week, where most of the chicken in the butter chicken tasted foully fishy, so off that you wanted to just spit it out. My girl and I left big chunks of it behind, had a meal of naan and sauce and palak paneer - all fine. But the kid at the counter didn't seem to understand that I was telling him the chicken had seemingly gone bad.

Funny how that works: a thousand great experiences of a restaurant stop counting when there's just one really really awful one.

And aberration or not, it's got me really worried. See, that was the night that I also injured my ankle, sprinting to see Seijun Suzuki's Tattooed Life and the Cinematheque (the early screening on Saturday the 27th). The ankle injury makes sense, can be tied to something I did, but the thing is, MANY of my joints have been hurting since then. The left ankle is the one out of commission, but my right ankle hurts too; the outsides of both my wrists are very sore, for no reason I can identify; and I woke up this morning with pain in my right hip joint. There are so many aches and pains in my joints - with only the ankle ones making any degree of sense - that I can't help but wonder if there's some connection between the tainted chicken and my aches: for instance, salmonella-borne reactive arthritis. You apparently don't need to actually have food poisoning to develop this condition, which is typified by joint pain, especially in the ankles.

I may just be being paranoid but I think it's time to go to the doctor...