Imodium saved my life.

I made a huge mistake and ate airline food while I was visiting my friend in China. Literally, as soon as i landed I knew something was very wrong. I thought it was just some strange Chinese food from the night before that wasn't sitting well with me. So as soon as I got into my hotel room, I ran to the bathroom and evacuated my bowels for the next 43 minutes. When this was over I passed out for the next few hours, never feeling like I was getting any better. My friend, who is a pharmacy major, and I tried to find a pharmacy in Beijing, which was more difficult to find than on would expect. We find a normal one (one that did not consist of herbal remedies). Neither of us knew Chinese all that well and the pharmacists didn't know English either. I thought that Bismuth would be fairly universal, being an element and all. After acting out my symptoms, the pharmacist finally understands and gives me something that contains pink bismuth, which is the active ingredient in pepto bismol. So I take this for the next couple of days and basically live off sprite and white rice. This goes on for the next 7 days, and I still get bouts of visious diarrhea. After thinking about it, I am pretty sure the chinese drugs were making the situation worse. Anyway, it comes time for me to fly back home, a 18 hour plane ride, in a confined space, with limited access to the bathroom. This prospect was one of the more frightening ones I've faced in my life. At this point, I moved out of the hotel and was staying in a hostel. I dicided to ask the hostel owner (who didn't really know english either) if she knew where if there was a pharamcy close by where I could hopefully search out some other drug to help me. At this point two older candian women (must have been in their late 50s, their youngest kids were in college) over hear me and say "Oh we completely under come to our room" where they tell me about how they've been in a similar situation they were in and they give me a package of this stuff so I could fly home.

tl;dr Don't eat Chinese airline food.