The internet uproar over pink slime seems to have started as a low rumble stemming from a less-than-accurate folk horror narrative that made the email and Facebook rounds many months ago.  That particular story, which included a laundry list of titillating, ghastly assertions, including one that mechanically separated meat contained, for lack of a better description, chicken lips and assholes, could be debunked in large part with a simple search at snopes.com.

SACRAMENTO, CA-

Awhile back my boyfriend told me a story over dinner that pretty much put me off my food. I then proceeded to tell just about everyone I know about said story and then just as quickly forgot about it. That is until it came up again tonight.

And now I just can’t resist sharing it with you good folks.

But first, a disclaimer: This story was told to me by my boyfriend, who heard it from his coworker. Therefore I cannot guarantee its veracity, nor my accuracy in its telling. It could be an urban legend for all I know. But, really, who makes this stuff up?

Now for the story:

My boyfriend’s coworker and his roommate were sitting around one day when the roommate’s girlfriend came over looking incredibly distraught.

The two men of course asked her what was eating at her. And she told them her best friend had just been hospitalized.

Naturally, they wanted to know why she’d been hospitalized.

She told them it had been for a possibly fatal case of Toxic Shock Syndrome.

You may not have read my post about it, so I’m just going to tell you here that I’m completely paranoid about TSS, which means even by this point in the story I was totally terrified.

“Did she forget to take out a tampon?!” I asked my boyfriend.

“Oh no, it gets worse,” he replied.

The two men ask the woman what caused the TSS.

She hesitates for a minute, maybe bites her lip. She reminds them that her friend, let’s call her Betty, is a little bit overweight.

And, well, apparently she’s a little more overweight than her best friend would like to admit because good ole’ Betty got pregnant and didn’t even realize it more than six months into the pregnancy.

Nor did Betty realize that when her period finally came again, it was actually her having a miscarriage.

Which is why she was shocked when the doctors asked her how long she’d been pregnant. And even more shocked when they told her the baby had died more than two months prior to this emergency room visit. And probably horrified when they told her that her Toxic Shock had been caused by the rotten fetus still inside her.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, a rotten fetus. This is what my boyfriend brought up at the dinner table.

And the moral to this story is: If you’re a sexually active obese woman who has irregular periods, keep some home pregnancy tests on hand.