Question of the day.

It really upsets me when I hear people…

My answer:

…vomiting. 😀 That was the first what came to my mind. I’m laughing while writing this, but the problem is real and serious. Anything about vomiting scares me and it is this way since as long as I can remember, although it wasn’t always to such an extent that you could call it phobic. Even the word vomit in all the languages in which I know how to say it sounds quite… not scary, but… don’t know, disgusting and… and maybe yes, maybe a bit scary. I can’t define a specific situation though that has caused this fear in me, however when I was in my early teens, lots of fears that I had before started to exacerbate and I got a bunch of speciffic phobias during relatively short time. At that time I was very neurotic and had lots of weird psychosomatic issues, well now we know they were psychosomatic but they were rather enigmatic then. I’ve never struggled with any serious digestive issues at all, but then I had overwhelming nausea most of the time and had just a single episode during that time when I vomited simply because of emotional overlload, as I know now. And as I can remember that was the moment when my fear really exacerbated.

I couldn’t hear people vomiting without feeling like my knees weere of jelly, nauseated, dizzy and about to faint, even people who were about to vomit scared me and it was very hard for me to hide. I could love you to pieces, but if you were sick, I wouldn’t come closer than a metre to you if I had the choice, and most willingly wouldn’t even be in the same room as you, even for a very short while. If I had to be with you, I’d then wash my hands for 5 minutes afterwards. It was just way stronger than me. I couldn’t watch movies where people vomited, gagged or even choked, it freaked me out immediately. Even books were hard to get through without making me shaky. And I think I don’t have to mention that I was scared of the possibility that I could vomit or even be close to it. At that time I had a whole lot of restrictions and if I had to break them, I was freaking out, oh, I was freaking out even not doing it, ’cause everything is possible. It was developing very quickly to the point that one of the staff at the boarding school was convinced I’m anorectic. My list of forbidden foods quickly evolved from a few speciffic dishes to most foods and I was very ingenious in making up ways to not alarm anyone with the fact I’m barely eating anything nutritious. It was scary. So many things were scary. Eating, drinking, travelling, tummybugs – which are often guests when so many people live together, periods, meds – well they could also be helpful at times – various scary diseases…………………

And it lasted for quite long, but I got somewhat better gradually after I left the boarding school. I am still emetophobic and it is a significant issue for me – I’m eaten up by anxiety whenever someone in my surroundings gets sick, no matter whether it’s contagious or not – I still have some foods I’ll NEVER EVER eat, even some which I actually liked, and theoretically still like, but, ugh, nooo. I still have times when it becomes worse out of nowhere and I can barely function like a normal human being. I still can’t watch movies with people vomiting, but talking about the topic as you can see isn’t so very scary now for me as it used to be, unless we don’t go too much in details. I can read books with people vomiting with almost no problem, or I just skip it and go on, although there were some books which I had to stop reading, like I remember there was one book by Colleen MCCullough I wanted to read, I started and enjoyed it, but there were people vomiting at least three times and I just couldn’t move on. Hearing people around me vomiting is hell.

But you know what’s most ridiculous about it? Since that time in my teens when I vomited, it has NEVER EVER happened to me again. I’ve read on the forum for emetophobics something that if I got it right, said that people who suffer from emetophobia are so blocked from vomiting that they can’t do it physically. Don’t know whether it’s true, and whether it changes anything, but it makes some sense. I’ve had one or two norovirus infection during all those years, I got also rather severely dehydrated once, and although I did feel like I’m just about to vomit then and my fear was indescribable, I just didn’t and it felt like I had some sort of blockade inside. People say vomiting it’s not pleasant, but it’s good because then you feel better, but I’d rather live with extreme nausea and other stuff all the time than vomit once.

OK, over. Yuck, what a fascinating topic.

How would you end this sentence and why? 🙂