I don’t remember why it started, but I do remember when – I think I was about nine or ten, in the middle of class, when the boy next to me put up his hand and told the teacher he felt sick.
This kid was known for being ‘difficult’, so maybe the teacher thought he was just saying that for attention, or to get out of class, or whatever, but either way she wouldn’t let him go to the nurse’s office. A few minutes later, he threw up all over the floor and himself. And since that day, I’ve had a deep-rooted, almost crippling fear of vomit.
Me vomiting, kids vomiting, people vomiting in my vicinity, the sound, the sight, the smell. All of it. The fear would later narrow to just a fear of myself being sick (I probably became immune to the sight of other people doing it during the good old binge-drinking university years), but from that day forward, it changed my life. I became terrified of going to restaurants, to cinemas, to public places in general that might attract children. Children, in my nine-year-old child’s head, were the main culprits of vomiting. I would beg to get a drive-thru for dinner rather than going inside a restaurant so I could eat it in the comfort of my own home, surrounded by people that I knew would never throw up on themselves, but would go to the bathroom to do it like upstanding citizens. Any time someone at school raised their hand to say they weren’t feeling well, or put their hand on their stomach, or even looked pale, I would excuse myself and hide in the bathroom, hoping that by the time I returned the vomiting would have already taken place, along with its requisite cleanup, and I wouldn’t have to see it.
Things did not improve as I got older. I caught the norovirus from an idiotic ex-boyfriend who told me he wasn’t contagious anymore, the day after he’d had it (if only I’d had a smartphone then and been able to verify the falsity of that claim). I became obsessed with washing my hands in university. I went to meet my then-boyfriend’s family in Yorkshire and started hyperventilating when I saw they only had a bar of soap in their bathroom, not liquid soap, that distinction being somehow important in my mind. I asked the then-boyfriend if bar soap carried the same disinfecting properties as liquid soap. He informed me that bar soap was the original disinfectant. It was his brother’s 18th birthday, we were at a party. He didn’t want to discuss the percentage of germ killing potential of various household soaps.
And then, when I was 25, I went on a trip to New York, and my sister got food poisoning. It was the longest night I can remember. We were sharing a hotel room and we had eaten the same thing for dinner, and it was like watching a preview of what was going to happen to me. I somehow escaped unscathed, but the damage had been done. It would be almost five years before I plucked up the courage to order meat at a restaurant again.
Chicken terrified me. I would only eat it if my Mum had cooked it, or in very specific social situations that demanded my politeness above all. I remember telling anyone who would listen, after my first disastrous meeting with my stepmother, that I had tried so hard to be nice that I’d even eaten the chicken she made for dinner, truly unheard of for me at the time. I accidentally ate something with chicken in at a work Christmas party and spent the rest of the night sweating and freaking out, not drinking and barely talking to anyone, terrified of doing anything that might set off the poisonous reaction from the uncooked chicken I may or may not have ingested. My old roommate’s boyfriend came to visit one weekend and offered to make us dinner. He told us he was going to make us chicken tartare. Raw chicken, I almost screamed. You have to be fucking kidding me. He was a CHEF, for fuck’s sake. He knew how to cook chicken. There was no logic to it at all.
It’s led to some weird conversations. Weird as in I seemed weird after having these conversations. People would assume I was vegetarian, then becoming confused when I made myself a bacon sandwich for breakfast – bacon, the only thing I trusted myself to cook, and even that I would burn to a crisp before eating it. Even recently, I ordered a vegan laksa and my friends asked when I had become vegan. I haven’t, I said, and before I could say anything else the waiter suggested that in that case, I should get the vegan laksa but made with prawn broth, because it was much better that way. What could I have said? I don’t want prawn broth, not because I’m vegan but because I don’t trust the chef to make it properly? I ordered the prawn broth and didn’t sleep that night, every twinge and gurgle of my stomach sending a fresh wave of sweat running over my body. I once had salad leaves for dinner because the chicken that my kind boyfriend had cooked was a bit pink in the middle.
It governs so much of my life. If I have to take a flight, I pay the extra money to get an aisle seat so I can be sure I can get up easily to go to the bathroom if I get sick. The night before flying I won’t have so much as a single beer, in case I accidentally then drink twelve more and start throwing up on the plane. If the pilot announces turbulence then I’ll take two Dramamine and sit like a statue until the seatbelt sign goes off again. The prospect of visiting friends for the weekend spawns a legion of internal questions – will they have a separate bathroom? Will I have to share a bed with someone who I might have to wake up multiple times in the night if I get sick and have to keep running to the bathroom? I always insist on sleeping on the floor rather than sharing a bed. I tell everyone it’s because I can’t sleep, which is true, but not for the reasons they think it is. It’s the reason I don’t smoke weed, why I only very occasionally take drugs, and only then once I’ve maniacally questioned everyone around me whether they might make me throw up. Alcohol is the one notable exception, and even then, the second I think I’ve had one drink too many I’ll sequester myself in a dark room where I can spiral into a panic in peace.
I’ve never really thought of it as selfish before. I mean, sure, it does on occasion affect other people – I’ve been on a few holidays with one patient friend in particular who has willingly bypassed much better looking restaurants in Mexico City and Tokyo* so I can find something vegetarian (or in the case of Mexico City, something that does not contain ANYTHING that might have been washed with tap water). But mostly I figured this is my stupid cross to bear and I’m the one suffering. I’ve never thought I needed to get over it for anyone’s benefit other than my own. I don’t miss meat – I barely used to eat it before. It’s just now I avoid it pathologically.
*This turned out to be a waste of time. I ordered vegetarian ramen and it came with a chicken leg floating in it.
But this weekend just gone, I went to this Chinese spot with my boyfriend and I ordered pork buns – pork buns being the only thing I’ve eaten in recent years that I decided is worth the potential risk of getting ill – and later that night, when we got home, he said he felt sick. He asked me what food poisoning felt like. I started reeling off all the facts and statistics and probabilities I’ve learned since my obsession began, but inside my head I was screaming. I could already feel my stomach starting to hurt, with nerves, with food poisoning, I didn’t know: another helpful side effect of this particular neuroses is that it always presents itself as a stomach ache, one of the telltale signs of the thing I’m worried about in the first place. And even while I was telling him it was probably fine, probably nothing, really, my only concern was for myself. He was the one who was sick, and I asked him over and over how he was feeling, but not because I was worried about him – although obviously I didn’t want him to be unwell – but because I was worried about myself.
We were both fine. It’s always fine. But it made me wonder at what point your internal anxiety starts to seep into other people’s lives, them unwittingly signing up to be friends with or date someone who has to plan any outing in minute detail to minimize the risk of coming into contact with bacteria that might make them throw up. At what point do you really just have to fucking get over it?
The last time I threw up was over two years ago. It was an experience that lasted maybe five minutes, and yet the fear of it still pervades, snakes its way into my mind every single day. It’s so… boring.
One good thing:
In my traditional manner of discovering things and telling everyone about them months, or even years, after they become popular: this week I came across ‘Welcome to the O.C., bitches!’ – a podcast where Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarke re-watch the entire O.C. canon and then discuss each episode with cast members, producers and writers. As a previous (and current) O.C. obsessive, this was quite the find. I’m three episodes in and have already had my mind blown by the following factoids:
- Olivia Wilde was the other choice to play Marissa Cooper. As in Olivia Wilde, Marissa’s love interest during her brief period of experimenting with the Sapphic in Season Two. So meta!
- Peter Gallagher accepted the role of Sandy Cohen because he somehow linked the O.C.’s underpinning plotline of being an outsider to the events of 9/11. Okay…?
- Josh Schwartz was 26 when he wrote the script. If you need me I’ll just be over here killing myself.
One bad thing:
I failed at making chowder. It was basically bits of things floating in oil-water. This is what happens when you try and assimilate into a country’s culture without fully understanding what you’re doing.