I had an interesting (and not at all pleasant) bout of gastroenteritis over yesterday and today - I spent a fun day in hospital today on a drip
And it illustrated something that was of relevance to the ToD argument. I had dinner on Saturday night, but felt awful when I woke up on Sunday, however I had some breakfast on Sunday morning nonetheless. After that, I had nothing further to eat at all on Sunday. I vomited at around 7pm on Sunday night, and the contents contained identifiable elements of my breakfast from around 10 hours previous, but no identifiable elements from my Saturday dinner (which passed out in the other direction!). So my Sunday breakfast had sat in my stomach for around 10 hours, before I brought it back up.
From this, it's clear that normal gastric function can be significantly affected by gastro-intestinal illness or infection. And this is entirely supported by medical literature. Now, some people choose to lean on this as a de facto rebuttal of any ToD arguments based on stomach/intestinal contents (along the lines of: "See! in certain circumstances, food can stay in the stomach for well over 8 hours! So there's no way you can use stomach contents as a ToD indicator! Nurrr!"
But........ the whole point is that normal stomach/intestinal function IS definable and measurable on a bell-curve of statistical probability. And it shows quite clearly that in an otherwise healthy adult, the stomach contents always (in over 99.995% of instances) start to empty into the duodenum within 4 hours of eating. The only thing which can upset these statistics is either extreme general illness, extreme terror, or specific gastro-intestinal illness.
Had Meredith been suffering from an intense general illness, or any significant form of GI illness, I can virtually guarantee that she would have been in no state to electively visit her friends' house and hang out for 5-6 hours. All she would have wanted to do would have been to lie in bed. So I think we can safely conclude that she wasn't acutely ill on the afternoon/evening of the 1st November. Of course, the evidence suggestes that she had been extremely drunk the night before (although we're not supposed to talk about that now, are we...?), but that would not have affected her GI function over 12 hours later.
One last point on this: some people seem to believe that another "gotcha" in this area is that some of Meredith's friends testified that the meal ended at around 7.45pm - and they then add 3-4 hours to this time in order to reach a ToD of 10-45-11.45pm. But these people seemingly do not understand that the important time is the start of the meal, not the end. The clock starts as soon as the first mouthful is taken, and we have pretty ample evidence that this was at around 6.30pm. Remember that there were identifiable elements of the pizza meal found in Meredith's stomach, and that it's abundantly clear that not only had no food had passed from the stomach to the duodenum, but also that there was no food matter in any of the small intestine except for a small amout at the very end.
And this all points to one inescapable conclusion: Meredith ate her final meal between around 6.30pm and 7.45-8.00pm. And that the state of her stomach/intestine contents at autopsy, when set against all the medical evidence, strongly suggests that Meredith almost certainly died before 10pm - and most likely by 9.30pm.
