Do You Have The Stomach For This?

I imagined I would have some fun shopping stories to share with you this weekend - I had plans to go out with a friend to an excellent group of shops to find her some new things / make getting dressed in the morning a less time-consuming undertaking - but instead I woke up in the middle of the night with the stomach flu.

At first, I didn't know if I'd drunk too much (3 glasses of wine, over 5 hour mega-protein dinner experience) though that seemed unlikely, whether I had food poisoning (I hoped not because a bunch of us went to a new restaurant and we all ate the same thing, more or less) or a bug.

But this morning, when the horrendous nausea switched digestive gears, I had my answer. Note: I write this in a moment of reprieve. Let's hope more of those are in my near future.

Anyway, I've had some time, i.e. a veritable capsule eternity, to consider nausea in detail. IMO, it's the worst feeling anyone can experience (though it isn't pain). It's relentless. When I was pregnant - as I had hours to remember last night - I threw up daily for 7 months. All that to say, it was a knowable, wan, almost manipulative nausea. This shit is "screaming collection officer" strength. This nausea is trying to take me down.

I will admit that the nausea of pregnancy almost did me in (my sister was medicated for hers which was so much worse than mine, even, she couldn't swallow the pills. Give that a moment of consideration.) During my pregnancy I needed only to look at something sideways and it would cause me to vomit on the spot. Like, on the subway (eventually I had to start walking to work to avoid that) or in sidewalk gutters. It was horrible and embarrassing a hundred times over, but it doesn't have an edge on "stomach bug" barf.

At this point, in this illness, time is my friend and my enemy - but more my friend than it was 8 hours ago. People who know me well, know that when I get sick, I become irrationally afraid of death. My sickness, in whatever form it takes, reminds me that one day I'm going to get something and I'm not going to be able to fight it off. You should have seen me in the 3-years of sickness phase known as "my kid's early childhood". I was that air-kiss mother from sitcoms. I know, this is such a cheery post...

Strangely, as I get older, my fear is not as extreme. My perspective on this is that, despite my ever-encroaching movement toward potential infirmity and death, I have experienced ever more recoveries from sickness with each passing year. It's a mind-fuck, yes?

It goes without saying, I'm never going to eat again. Maybe you could regale me with some stories about your own heroic recoveries from acute illness? (Lord knows, if you hit me with some stories about ongoing illness, I will most certainly come to appreciate this particular moment properly.) How do you deal with this sort of thing? Are you stoic? Pathetic? Somewhere in between?