It Happens...

When I was 13, the fam took a road trip to Disneyland. On the road I started feeling not so hot. I went from a headache, to a headache and dizzy, to a headache, dizzy, and nauseous. I was in the backseat on the passenger’s side of our SUV and my sister was sitting across from me, behind our dad, who was driving. Mom was riding shotgun.

I tell my mom I’m not feeling good and she hands me a bottle of water to drink. I try, but it makes me feel worse. I lay my head back on the headrest with my eyes closed hoping the feeling would pass. I really don’t remember having any time to ask my dad to pull over. It was like in one second I felt 10 times worse and half a second after that, I went off like a fountain in Vegas.

I go from head fully back, pointed at the ceiling, to jerking forward while projectile vomiting. It happened so fast, but the end result was me getting puke on literally everyone in the car. Some even hit the roof. It was on my sister’s leg, my dad’s right arm, and worst of all, in my mom’s hair. The rest was just pure carnage. Puke was on the back of my mom’s seat, dripping into the backseat pocket, on the floor, in the cup holder, and all over me. With my sister and mom screaming, my dad pulls over to the side of the road. But it’s really too late, the damage is done. By the time the car stops, I’ve puked a couple more times.

I lean out the car door and practically fall out because I’m so dizzy. I retch and heave on the side of the road until I’m empty. My mom tries to help everyone clean up with a pack of Wet Ones while my dad tries to carefully remove the floor mat holding most of my spew. The car was still a wreck though, and the smell was disgusting. We rode to the hotel with the windows down. 

Finally checked in, dad comes to get us to go up to our room on the 11th floor. Thank god I was empty because the elevator ride made dry heave. I stripped, fell into bed and went to sleep in the fetal position. My dad took the car out to be cleaned. It cost $250. Mom got me some Dramamine.

Funnily enough, that wasn’t the only puking incident on that trip. My sister got off the Matterhorn ride, took about 10 steps, and blew chunks. We spent the better part of an hour waiting for her and my mom to come out of the restroom. Mom said every time she thought my sister was done, she wasn’t. My sister says she tried to exit the restroom stall at least three times and had to turn right back around. The first time she barely made it back into the stall in time. The Matterhorn fucked her up.

No problem, though. I’m at home and I don’t have any Zoom meetings for another couple of hours. I make my way to my bathroom to relieve myself. The next unusual thing that happened was that it turned out to be diarrhea, which is not how it normally goes when I drink coffee. Also, instead of the pooping relieving my stomach cramps, the cramps were getting worse. Instead of mild discomfort, I was in serious pain. This was weird.

Every couple of minutes I was plopping out more sludge from my backside, but I was hurting worse and worse. Then I got really overheated for some reason. Then I got horribly nauseous. So here I am trapped on the toilet, doubled over in pain, feeling like I want to throw up, with cramps rolling through my stomach, and slow moving diarrhea that just won’t quit. Fucking great.

My toilet is in a little cubby area of the bathroom, isolated for privacy. I didn’t have a trashcan nearby or anything to grab in case I started throwing up and I can’t get off the toilet. By now I’m sweating, in agony, and trying to take deep cleansing breaths like I’m in labor to try to stop myself from puking. It’s not working, though, and I get that build up of saliva in my mouth that says vomiting is imminent. Still, I’m periodically pushing out mud from other end. It’s a worst case scenario.

I feel breakfast start to come up and instinctively cover my mouth, which is actually a dumb move. It definitely doesn’t hold it in and it shoots out from behind my hand. Puke sprays both walls of the toilet cubby. The rest lands on the floor between my legs. At this point, I just want relief. I sound like the fake puke noises you hear in the movies, and it’s amazing to me because I’m not usually loud when I throw up. The best I can describe it is as a guttural “huuuuyaaawwwwwnnnnggg” type of sound. It felt like the most urgent, unstoppable, purge as the puke poured out of me and splattered all over the floor, splashing the legs of my sweats and my bare feet. My body wasn’t going to allow a drop of my breakfast to stay in me. I willingly gave it all up to the floor. It was a revolting yellowish brown mess and I could see bits of green and red peppers in it. Meanwhile, my ass is still spasmodically emptying itself. The only bright side was that I was feeling better.

By the time I was done, the tears were falling, the snot was running, and I was physically shaking. I just sat for a while and tried to get it together enough to clean myself up. Fortunately, I have a cat so I was able to pour kitty litter on the disaster in front of my toilet. It was so nasty looking and my stomach was so unsettled that I heaved and puked a couple more times while trying to pour the kitty litter, but it was just stomach acid by that point.

There was only one bathroom in our apartment. It was the worst kind of bonding experience. Mere words are insufficient to describe what we did to that poor bathroom. I can tell you burning the whole place down would’ve been easier than the clean up. We used everything with a drain and still ended up with puke running down the wall, shit on the floor and discarded clothes and underwear piled up in the corner. That was in addition to clogging the sink with vomit and diarrhea in the bathtub.

At the point where I was shitting into the bathtub and vomiting into a trashcan because my roommate had her head in the toilet with nothing to catch what was running through her shorts and out the other end, I considered calling 911. Then I considered calling my mom. But then I thought I just needed to deal. Shit happens and sometimes it happens in your pants as you’re running to the bathroom trying to hold in your puke. Yes, I was the one who projectile vomited on the wall. Neither of us had ever been so sick or have it come on so suddenly and dramatically. I woke up feeling fine and by 10 am everything was being purged out of me violently. My stomach was sore for days after and my backside felt like I’d done anal. It was sore and burning.

We tried cleaning up between episodes, but it was impossible. Moving too much would just trigger more of the same. This went on all day, to the point where I was totally exhausted and at one point just laid on my bedroom floor with a towel wrapped around my bare bottom half and a towel laid on the floor to catch whatever came out either end because I didn’t have the energy to make it back to the bathroom, which was a mess anyway. It was torture. Thank God the floor was wood and not carpeted because although I was near empty, I wasn’t quite done, unfortunately.

The next day was better because we were both completely empty and very dehydrated. I went to the vending machine downstairs and got us four bottles of Sprite. We were both able to keep the Sprite down so I went back and got four more and we lived on that the entire day. That gave us enough strength to clean up. I decided that my underwear and leggings were beyond saving. Everything else, including every towel we owned went into the laundry and through two hot wash cycles. Between the clean up and the laundry, we used an entire gallon of bleach. Finally, we could begin to put this nightmare behind us.

Me and my buddies had been out partying and drinking. Nothing crazy happened but the next morning I definitely had a hangover. My friend suggests we all go to Sonic to get something to eat. Cool, I’m hungry and it’ll probably help with the headache. I order a breakfast burrito and a coke. We’re all eating in the car, and it’s not totally sitting well with me, but I’m hungover and that’s to be expected. I didn’t feel like I was gonna throw up or anything at all.

My 5 year old once got sick out of the blue and vomited on the floor at home. I’m super sensitive to anything messy or gory. I can’t take it. But a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do. I manage to get my kid to the bathroom where he vomits again. I’m trying not to gag. I flush that away immediately and get him cleaned up and settled in bed with a bucket.

Now comes the hard part. I can’t even look at the mess without gagging. I need to get it cleaned up though. I get a roll of paper towels, some spray cleaner, and a garbage bag and head back in. I’m trying not to look and not to breathe but it’s impossible. The first whiff of it makes me gag. The first glance at it makes me gag. Just writing this is giving me flashbacks of fruit punch and chicken nugget vomit.

I leave the room and give myself a minute and then go back in. I drop some paper towels on it and try to mop it up to dump in the trash bag. Even through the layers of paper towels I could feel the slimyness of it. I gag again. I try to get the paper towels over to the bag asap. Vomit drips from the paper towels. That’s it, I’m done for. I’m gagging and at the same time trying to suppress the urge to vomit. I feel something come up into the back of my throat and I try to swallow it back down. It doesn’t work and it comes back up with double the force. I vomit three times in row without so much as taking a breath in between. In my vomit panic, I don’t think to aim for the garbage bag. So now the mess has quadrupled. I’m so disgusted at the sight of it I gag and vomit again. And again. And again. I’m heaving like someone squeezing a squirt bottle over and over. How is it that a normal amount of food looks like you ate a whole buffet when it comes back up?

By now I’m a mess. The only upside is the tears in my eyes have made everything blurry so I can’t see what I’ve done clearly. I stumble to the bathroom and wipe my eyes, nose and mouth while trying to take deep breaths to calm myself down. I’m not sure how I can get this done, which is just making my vomit panic worse. The only thing I can think to do, as much as I hate it, is to empty myself out completely so that when I gag, nothing will come up. I go back in and pick the garbage back up. I take a look at the mess on the floor and immediately start gagging again. This time I don’t fight it. I start vomiting again in the garbage back and I keep going until the dry heaves set in.

I was home on the weekend feeling lousy so I decided to go to the store to get some meds, juice, soup and go back home to rest. I’d gotten almost everything on my grocery list and headed over to the pharmacy side of the store for some cold and flu medicine. I was feeling like absolute shit at this point and had broken out in a cold sweat. I couldn’t wait to get back home and crawl into bed.

So I’m in the pharmacy section and I bend over to look at the medicine on a shelf just below waist level. Well, that was a bad move. It did something to my stomach. A wave of intense nausea swept over me. I felt like I could throw up on the spot, but I didn’t. Like a responsible adult, I make beeline for the restrooms, grocery cart in tow, mouth watering, and willing myself not to upchuck. The pharmacy is in the front of the store, but the restrooms are all the way in the back. I almost made it.

I was a few feet from the restroom door when my mouth filled with vomit. I couldn’t hold it in. I threw up on the floor in front of store employees. Still, I tried to get to a toilet, hand covering my mouth. I get as far as the sink. At that point I gave up, gripped the counter, and blew chunks mightily. From then, I was on autopilot in an I-can’t-believe-that-just-happened kind of way. I tried to rinse the sink out, but that didn’t go very well. I rinsed my mouth out and splashed my face with water, ignoring the fellow customer looking at me with disgust. I left the restroom (my barf was now covered with paper towels), got my cart, and checked out. I got to my car, calmly emptied the contents of one of the bags on the passenger seat, and proceeded to puke out whatever was left of my guts. Then I drove home.

When I sat and started doing my business, which turned out to be diarrhea, something happened to me that never happened before or since. My stomach lurched and with zero warning I projectile vomited. It really and truly just shot out of me with no effort on my part. Some hit the stall door, some flew out under the stall door and landed on the floor between the stalls and the sinks, and some got on me. I can’t turn around and use the toilet because I was actively having the runs, so I put my head down, lift my legs up and puke on the floor. I continue to effortlessly destroy that stall from both ends for the next few minutes. I don’t push and I don’t gag or anything. My stomach lurches and It just comes out.  I have no idea what’s wrong with me. Other than the stomach cramps, I was feeling fine.

When things calmed down, the dilemma was how to even get out of that tiny stall without stepping in my own vomit. Cleaning it up wasn’t an option. All I had was that cheap thin industrial toilet paper and that was going to be no match for what I’d just yakked up. I clean my ass and contort myself trying to step on my tiptoes around the mess. I flush, it doesn’t all go down and the water starts rising. I panic. I don’t stop to wash my hands or rinse my mouth out, I just haul ass before someone comes in and hope nobody sees me with puke splatter drying on my jeans. 

Of course I decide to skip the rest of my classes and go home. I get home just in time to point my head at the toilet and throw up again, which causes me to shit myself. It was long day of puking until I dry heaved along with the mega squirts. I passed out asleep around 7pm and didn’t wake up until 6am the next day. I don’t know what kind of bug I had, but the next day I was fine.