Sick of Motion

Do you have a headache? You can expect your friends clustering around you offering an instant pharmacy of help. A cold? Sympathy and varieties of home remedies all round will be on offer, unless you choose to sneeze in someone’s face! Fever, body aches, wounds? Everyone is so solicitous of your welfare. What is it about motion sickness, then, that gets you the horse’s laugh when you only claim having it or the averted face and wrinkled nose when you demonstrate that you do have it?

Imagine your head spinning so fast that you feel the need to hold on to it to check whether it is still moored to the neck. Imagine your stomach churning vigorously and knowing that what will come up will not be butter. Imagine all the food that you gorged on wanting to make the journey back up your gullet, when you have a strong suspicion that it will not taste as good when coming up as it did when it went down. Is this misery any less than your headaches, fevers or pains that you will merrily hand over a barf bag and make fool comments about morning sickness and pregnancy merely because my stomach doesn’t have a starved look?

About those barf bags! Every time you put your face close to it to spew out the remnants of your morning upma you inhale the invigorating scent of what your previous morsel has been turned into by the action of your stomach. The smell has something of an Axe effect – only what it brings a-running is not a bevy of scantily clad beauteous damsels but the rest of whatever is there in the stomach. If anyone also thought that carrying it around like a trophy bag made one feel proud, they need their heads examined.

I am not unreasonable. I can even understand your quaint dislike to having the remains of my breakfast dumped in your lap, after being processed by my digestive enzymes. What I fail to understand is why you have to be so facetious and unsympathetic to my problems. Instead of saying ‘There! There! I know how difficult it must be for you”, you say, “If you will vomit, what can you expect?” as though I chose to be motion-sick after a careful assessment of all available choices.

And, then, there are the conversationalists! Just as you are feeling like a well-shaken champagne bottle desperately holding on to the cork, there is always someone who will ask you how you are feeling and feel wounded if you do not reply. As though they do not understand that you are not sure about whether you would spew out words or vomit when you open your mouth. (Not much difference, did you say? Go read another blog, bro, I am not talking to you!)

One has to look on the positive side of anything! Motion sickness does get me the window seat in the front of any vehicle I travel by when in a group. Fear is a great motivator and nobody wants to take the chance of having me bathe them in odorous liquid while on a trip. If your neighbor in the vehicle is crowding you too much a mild retching noise is sufficient to get you all the space in the world! There is always a silver lining in any cloud but no one has, as yet, assured me that the cloud is worth having merely because it has a silver lining!