Tales of Gory Woe

Warning: Please read only the censored version if you suffer from qualms of the mind, soul, or body in regards to bodily matters, particularly those concerning malfunctions of the stomach. But fear not, for there are no images (in pixels anyway) for you to be concerned about. The Not Censored Version does contain descriptions that are not, perhaps, for the faint of heart. But if you are of the faint of heart, read it any way and it will likely rectify the faintness of your heart with its account of my maladies. And if you do suffer from qualms of the mind, soul, or body, I'd still recommend reading it just so that you can appreciate how many synonyms I came up with for the word “puke” without using any kind of thesaurus. Thank you and have a nice, puke-free day.

Censored Version:

I threw-up last night, but I'm better now.

Not Censored Version:

Last night, I puked up a storm. I do not recall ever having puked quite so much in the entirety of my short life here on planet earth. Massive quantities of chicken and peas and rice and pineapple and casino cookies met with my friend the toilet. To make the situation even better, I was unable to flush the toilet or wash my hands because for some reason still unbeknownst to me, the water was not working, so a large amount of my dinner enjoyed the company of the toilet for a decent amount of time.

It really was a dramatic puking session I must say. I was coughing it up so hard that I was crying buckets by the end – not tears of pain (though those certainly would not have been entirely unwarranted), no, it was simply because the sheer force of all that effort elicited a great many tears which served to cover my face in a layer of wetness whilst I hunched over in agony.

Since I have been experiencing some allergies recently, a sizable amount of mucus was represented in the partially digested chicken dinner. I got out of bed and ran to the bathroom with hopes that I might puke, but when that was to no avail after several minutes of leaning hopefully over my friend the toilet, I figured I might as well relieve my bladder if not my stomach, and shortly thereafter was when I vomited. This fact of life meant that the orange-green substance with black chunks was now combined with urine. Isn't it just grand? And it gets even better. After what felt like an ocean of acidic chicken-pea-rice mush burbled and gurgled its way out of my body, I cautiously stood up assuming that the worst was over, but it was not so. Back down I went. This lovely ordeal repeated itself numerous times before at long last, only small chunks of caloric substances still sputtered their way out from under my tongue and the back of my throat and the roof of my mouth and other such places where chunks of regurgitated food are apt to hide. A strange thing was that I could very distinctly smell and taste the flavor of the peas and chicken sauce especially. On second thought, perhaps that is not actually so strange since that was indeed what I consumed for dinner a few hours prior to upheaval. But at the time, it somehow struck me as being strange that this conglomeration of grossness so drastically different in appearance than what had been on my dinner plate could possibly have any relation to said dinner plate. I am beginning to believe that those particular foods may not appeal to me for some time yet. But as the good book says, there is a time for everything. A time for chicken and a time for no more chicken. A time for consuming peas and a time for fasting from peas. A time for your food to have a bit of fun pretending to be Mr. Bilbo Baggins as he makes the full journey There and Back Again.

Initially, my reaction was to wallow in misery, wishing pathetically for a sympathetic motherly figure to send me whimpering and complaining all the way to bed with a warm cup of tea, a few saltines, and a good dose of meds, but then I came to the sudden and thrilling realization that the combination of being on your own for the first time and being deathly sick is actually quite exciting, and so my misery quickly transformed into a dramatic flair, and I was suddenly catapulted into a marvelous land where *heroine suffers from severe indigestion and survives incredible bouts of barfing* My favorite part about that (besides imagining myself as said heroine, of course) was the alliteration in “bouts of barfing”. That line, I'll have you know, was not a line carefully contrived hours after the calamity. No, that very line did indeed flash appealingly through my mind within minutes of my nutritional sustenance defying gravity.

The exhilaration, however, eventually fizzled out into introspective thankfulness that I had a white and shiny porcelain bowl to puke into and that I don't live right outside where there would be goat fecal matter to meet my puke instead, and that I have things like electricity to illuminate the puke (illuminated puke, I feel like, is vastly nicer than puke lurking in dark corners, though I can't say that I speak from experience. Yet.) And I was thankful for a welcoming bed with only a few spiders, ants, and other assorted creepy crawly creatures to cuddle up into and to fall soundly asleep in. Just kidding, I lied, I did not fall soundly asleep. I immediately proceeded to write up a detailed account of the exciting episode, which probably wasn't the wisest thing I've ever done and I learned a valuable life lesson, that being this: describing the particulars of your puke in the wake of the puke itself can sometimes lead to renewed nausea, especially when you stay up an additional hour editing and revising your descriptions. But capturing the moment certainly took precedence over what was indubitably imagined renewal of the nausea. Best of all, I can be thankful for I have a whole bunch of dear friends and family – over one hundred, often more than two or three hundred, checking this blog each day, who love me enough to read my tales of gory woe. Life is good.

P.S. To Abraham and Paul Paternoster: Because I fully realize you are wont to question the validity of the statements I have made above concerning my state of health (or lack thereof), I would like you to know that had you been here to witness this event, you yourselves could not have depicted it in a more true or accurate way. In fact, I am convinced that you would have been so repulsed that your resulting narratives would have been highly more sensationalized and hyperbolic than this tame, gentle, and understated account.