About two weeks after her surgeries for the removal of the adrenal gland and the renal cell cancer, my wife started vomiting. This wasn’t just an occasional “blast”, but a more or less constant barrage. Hour after hour. At first, everyone thought “she has the flu…” which made sense… it was late January or early February when it started. But it wasn’t the flu… or a virus, or something related to the immune system, or some complication from the recent surgeries, or something related to the endocrine system, or bone cancer, or some strange gastro-intestinal disorder. All of these things (and more) were examined as potential causes. The vomiting continued, except for short respites, until June – nearly five months. The short respites (if you could call them that) occurred when she was hospitalized. Sometimes it would take a day or two in the hospital, other times it took a week or ten days to bring the vomiting under control. In June the vomiting just trailed off. The official diagnosis was “neuropathic” vomiting. Or, as one physician honestly told me, “a clinical way of saying we not sure what the hell was going on”. That wasn’t entirely true – the cause was the brain randomly setting the process in motion and the not being able to turn it off. Hence the “neuropathic” term. A small dose of an anti-depressant seemed to do the trick. She was prescribed it with the hopes that it would calm the system down. For whatever reason, that worked.
This was a brutal time for us. My wife felt absolutely miserable, which is easy to understand. For me it was a different story. I hate vomiting. I hate the sight of it, the sound of it, and the smell of it. I realize that no one loves it (although, somewhere out there, people probably exist who relish the sensation). However, there are people who can manage being around sick people and clean up vomit without blinking an eye. They are capable of wallowing in the stuff and barely flinch. These creepy bodily functions are just no big deal for them. I could never understand how they did that. Not me though. Just hearing someone retch from afar can make me gag. So, I actually fear being around anyone who may be ill or is getting ill. Needless to say this was a huge challenge.
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This was a brutal time for us. My wife felt absolutely miserable, which is easy to understand. For me it was a different story. I hate vomiting. I hate the sight of it, the sound of it, and the smell of it. I realize that no one loves it (although, somewhere out there, people probably exist who relish the sensation). However, there are people who can manage being around sick people and clean up vomit without blinking an eye. They are capable of wallowing in the stuff and barely flinch. These creepy bodily functions are just no big deal for them. I could never understand how they did that. Not me though. Just hearing someone retch from afar can make me gag. So, I actually fear being around anyone who may be ill or is getting ill. Needless to say this was a huge challenge.
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