Fond memories of vomit?

7 April 2013

Fond memories of vomit?


Things are looking up. On the 3rd day post surgery I'm upright and upbeat; feeling good without much pain or even substantial discomfort. That's good newz, because as I proved in the operating room, me and powerful pain medications and/or anesthetics simply do not agree. The nurses offer pain meds, but I learned the hard way that my stomach just won't cooperate; it's better to tolerate the pain, than to tolerate the nausea and vomiting.
Which reminds of several stories from my childhood (doesn't everybody have vomiting stories from their childhood?); and who doesn't love a good vomiting story or two :-/


Story #1
1958
With my family on holiday and driving through California for a week in a cabin at Clear Lake. Dad and mom in the front seat with the baby, in our aqua blue Ford station wagon, 5 girls and Chuck in the back seat, and two more kids in the way back in the "well" - me and brother Don. Amongst the usual commotion with lots of giggling and the occasional skirmish breaking out, brother Chuck announced he felt like "throwing up". Of course dad wouldn't have any talk of pulling over to accommodate a sick kid: "If we did that, we'd never get anywhere!" He was on a mission to get to our destination, so minor disturbances were to be dealt with at 60 miles per hour. That included a supply of empty coke bottles we could use to urinate in. So in this emergency, we went into code orange alert status, moving Chuck to the window and mom telling him to "pant like a dog". That of course works only temporarily, after which Chuck let loose with the inevitable, showering the side of the car, and the substantial blowback into the well area. Now my bother Don always was bigger and badder than me, (at least until I reached 18 years old and put an end to that) so he made sure I was stuck in the blast zone and received a pretty good drenching of Chuck's reprocessed pancake breakfast. To me it really didn't seem so bad, or even so unusual, as I probably witnessed dozens of family hurling episodes in various locations from restaurants to churches and such. You just get cleaned up, and get out of the way next time. One of the many joys of being in a big family :-)

Story #2
1965
St. Joseph's School in Waukesha, Wisconsin was a strict Catholic gulag with some fairly nasty nuns running the place. Our 6th grade class (Sister Virgilius) was on a scheduled bathroom break, where we all lined up waiting to use the toilet at the end of the hall. I was enjoying a laugh or two with my buddy Mickey Thompson when I noticed out of the corner of my eye, a large body moving swiftly out of Sister Mary Janet's 7th grade classroom. It was Jeronimo Cortez, a big guy who played on the football team, and he was sprinting for the bathroom with his hand covering his mouth. Now Mary Janet was notorious for running a locked-down classroom, and there were many stories of students who got sick and vomited in class, then were forced to clean it up. Jeronimo however, was not having any of that, so he bolted for the door, out into the hallway, and right towards me. That's when his hand dropped from his mouth and out came a huge shower of chunky smelly hurl. Now because I saw the whole thing coming, I nimbly stepped aside to avoid any contact with said chunks. Mickey Thompson however, was not so fortunate. He turned to see the commotion just in time to get a full frontal drenching from Jeronimo's apparently large lunch. Like people go to auto races to see the crashes, it was particularly entertaining to have a front-row seat to this disaster. The further good news was that I got accompany Mickey down to the boys locker room where he got a shower and a football uniform to wear for the rest of the day. Jeronimo, on the other hand, was handed a mop and bucket.


So here I am in the hospital with a keyboard and an internet connection enjoying memories of my childhood. I guess my recovery is going well :-)