La Mondaine has a terrible fascination with the workings of her innards. At the same time, she's never really quite grasped the concepts of personal boundaries or workplace-appropriate conversation topics, and whenever she experiences bowel problems she feels she not only has to share this information with the rest of us, but needs to find other sufferers with whom she can trade stories. It doesn't matter if she knows the other people or not; she'll keep asking the people she does know until she can find someone who's been sick lately so she can try to compare symptoms by proxy.
So when The Invertebrate's children are sick over the weekend and he mentions feeling a bit ill himself, La Mondaine can't let the chance pass.
"What was it? What did they have?"
"Oh, it was just a tummy bug. The kind of thing young kids always pick up when someone drops a sick kid off at kindy."
"So what did you have?"
"I was just feeling a bit crook, that's all," he says evasively, belatedly realising he's already on the slippery slope and the conversation can only go in one direction from here.
"Were there stomach cramps?"
"Not really. I just wasn't feeling that great."
"Were you vomiting?"
"... No ..." (Getting nervous now.)
She leans forward with a dreadful, eager intensity, "Was there diarrhea?"
"No!" He laughs uncomfortably and beats a hasty retreat into his office.
But La Mondaine is on a roll and will not be thwarted so easily.
"What about you?" she asks, turning to me.
"What?"
"Weren't you away sick?"
"No."
"But your kids were sick, weren't they?"
"One of them was, about two months ago."
"Did they have ... The Runs?"
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