Mark Kapczynski had been looking forward to it for weeks.

He had VIP tickets for him and his wife to attend an upscale seafood festival in Los Angeles last December, where they would feast on the food he grew up eating as a kid in Boston.

Surrounded by shellfish presented raw on ice by some of the city’s best chefs, Kapczynski said he chose to sample a few “Fanny Bay” oysters harvested from the southern British Columbia coastline.

“After three or four hours, I wished I was dead, it hurt so much,” said Kapczynski, who was hit with severe abdominal pain, vomiting every 30 minutes for five hours. “It was the most painful thing I’ve ever felt.”

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