Sick of Motion

Doyou have a headache? You can expect your friend clustering around you offeringan instant pharmacy of help. A cold? Sympathy and varieties of home remediesall 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 isit about motion sickness, then, that gets you the horse’s laugh when you onlyclaim having it or the averted face and wrinkled nose when you demonstrate thatyou do have it?Imagineyour head spinning so fast that you feel the need to hold on to it to checkwhether it is still moored to the neck. Imagine your stomach churning vigorouslyand knowing that what will come up will not be butter. Imagine all the foodthat you gorged on wanting to make the journey back up your gullet, when youhave a strong suspicion that it will not taste as good when coming up as it didwhen it went down. Is this misery any less than your headaches, fevers or painsthat you will merrily hand over a barf bag and make fool comments about morningsickness and pregnancy merely because my stomach doesn’t have a starved look?Aboutthose barf bags! Every time you put your face close to it to spew out theremnants of your morning upma you inhale the invigorating scent of what yourprevious morsel has been turned into by the action of your stomach. The smellhas something of an Axe effect – only what it brings a-running is not a bevy ofscantily clad beauteous damsels but the rest of whatever is there in thestomach. If anyone also thought that carrying it around like a trophy bag madeone feel proud, they need their heads examined.Iam not unreasonable. I can even understand your quaint dislike to having theremains of my breakfast dumped in your lap, after being processed by mydigestive enzymes. What I fail to understand is why you have to be so facetiousand unsympathetic to my problems. Instead of saying ‘There! There! I know howdifficult it must be for you”, you say, “If you will vomit, what can youexpect?” as though I chose to be motion-sick after a careful assessment of allavailable choices.And,then, there are the conversationalists! Just as you are feeling like awell-shaken champagne bottle desperately holding on to the cork, there isalways someone who will ask you how you are feeling and feel wounded if you donot reply. As though they do not understand that you are not sure about whetheryou would spew out words or vomit when you open your mouth. (Not muchdifference, did you say? Go read another blog, bro, I am not talking to you!)Onehas to look on the positive side of anything! Motion sickness does get me thewindow seat in the front of any vehicle I travel by when in a group. Fear is agreat motivator and nobody wants to take the chance of having me bathe them inodorous liquid while on a trip. If your neighbor in the vehicle is crowding youtoo much a mild retching noise is sufficient to get you all the space in theworld! 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 silverlining!