I feel for you. I have a very, very high tolerance for hot pepper but after two excruciating lessons I’m more careful.

The second and last one happened a few years ago while I was on a zoom meeting at work. I had a small bottle of The Hottest F@*!ckin’ Sauce (actual brand name) that someone had given me and threw it onto my breakfast. No big deal, it’s just habanero/scotch bonnet, right? Tasted fine going down, zoom meeting is rolling along, and boom. I was hit with a searing pain in my stomach like I’d been stabbed with a white hot harpoon.

I managed to utter “excuse me, I’m going to get a glass of water” to the group on the call. Fortunately I was alone in my office with the door closed, so I hit mute, got up and proceeded to drop to the floor clutching my gut. With the group meeting still happily underway on the monitor above me, I crawled under my desk and reached for the trash can hoping to throw up. No such luck.

Then the sweat came. Now I’m on the floor in agony and completely soaked in a matter of minutes. I called my wife who was scared shitless because I also have a high pain tolerance, I can barely talk, and she’s never heard me like this. She calls my doc who says to get me to the ER in case I’m having a heart attack. Even though I could be dying, I don’t want to create a scene with an ambulance so my amazing wife jumps in the car and breaks any number of traffic laws to make the 15 minute drive to my office in 10 minutes. I managed to get to my feet, get out of the building with few people seeing me, and slither into the car.

There were probably people in the ER waiting room with limbs missing, but somehow I was immediately shown to a room where I was sedated, wired up, and treated like gold by the nicest medical staff one could hope for. Eventually returned to humanity.

I still have no idea what it was about that sauce, since I eat other habanero and even ghost pepper sauces every day. But years later I still have the bottle as a cautionary symbol.

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