August 5, 2005

• WARNING: This post is gross.

  Heaving Dryly
  © The Author, 2005

  Yesterday (I guess we can call it that, since I am posting at 2:00 am Friday), on my way to O’Hare airport to travel to St. Louis to teach another College Summit writing workshop, I died. Well, almost anyways.

  After a morning of feeling vaguely funny, which I chalked up to being over-heated in our heinously muggy un-air-conditioned apartment (Chi-town’s been reaching a sopping wet 105 as of late), I trotted off to the Blue Line to journey to the airport. The icky feeling was to get progressively worse.

  I did my best to ignore the blurry dark spots invading my peripheral vision as I boarded the subway car. I tried to convince myself that my queasy feeling would soon pass as I hunched in my seat with my head between my legs, soaking my shirt with a steady stream of cold sweat. Upon arrival at the airport, I tried to make it to the bathroom before collapsing, but I only made it as far as the nearest reeking garbage can. Attempting to look as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a disgustingly sweaty, panting person to squat down randomly in front of a garbage can, I tried to will my body into cooperating with my travel itinerary. My body passed out instead.

  A few minutes later, I woke to a friendly, mullet-ed Chicago Public Transit Authority worker shaking my limp, sopping shoulder.

  “Hey! Are you okay?” He asked me kindly.
  In lieu of saying, “I’ll be fine, thank you,” I dry-heaved a bitter, bile-stenching breath in his beautifully compassionate face.

  I have a history of dry heaving and passing out in public. This is largely due to a quirky little hereditary disease I have called Vasovagal Syncope (see http://www.ncemi.org/cse/cse0101.htm for details). This “disease” (I feel like a leper calling it that) is more embarrassing than harmful, as it mainly means that my body refuses to feel pain or anticipation. Since my blood pressure flat to refuses to cramp its style with adjustments that would accommodate survival during unsavory feelings, I simply pass out. As long as I don’t hit my head or fall onto anything that will kill me on my way down, it’s fine. Mostly, it is just embarrassing to wake up afterwards, especially since on more than one occasion I wake to people who assume I’ve passed out because of an eating disorder or due to being in the early stages of pregnancy—both conditions being ones that I have never suffered from.

  Since illness is accompanied by a plethora of unsavory feelings, I also frequently pass out when I’m sick. This is also pretty embarrassing because instead of feeling refreshed when I wake up (as I do when I pass out in a healthy state), I dry heave loudly upon entering consciousness, as the kindly CTA worker discovered first hand.

  Warf!

  The nice CTA man asked if I wanted him to call a medical unit and I shook my head no. Instead, I asked if he could please use one of those little airport golf carts to haul my putrid ass to the nearest restroom. After being nice enough to let me lean on his forearm on the escalator, he pawned me off to another CTA worker with a golf cart. Amazingly, my puke was able to hold off its burning exit from my trachea until the golf cart dropped me off at the nearest ladies room. I’ll spare you the details, but it was vile to say the least.

  Being too sick to venture back on the el, I reasoned that perhaps eating a bit of something would ease my pain. The trouble was that the food court was on the other side of the security checkpoint—so what’s a sordid, vomitous Chicago Art Girl to do? In my stupidly nauseated state, I actually did the unthinkable. I went through a security check point for a food court.

  Once I miraculously made it through the security checkpoint without passing out, I gagged at the sights and smells of the fast food Mecca. Consciously holding back any food remnants from making a violent departure from my stomach, I feebly made my way to the smoothie stand.

  “One small banana smoothie, please,” my puke-stained voice moaned.
  “Five dollars,” the indifferent clerk sighed.

  I shelled out a little less than thirty minutes pay before the clerk horrified me with the way she made my hideously expensive drink. First, she squirted a dog-shit sized lump of soft serve vanilla frozen yoghurt into the blender pitcher. Then, she dumped a few sad frozen banana slices atop the lumpy squirt. Lastly, she added tap water to the terrible concoction before blending my caloric replenishment into a gross, goopy smoothie from hell.

  I tried to convince myself that I needed to eat something, that I would be fine once something was in my stomach. But as I raised the straw to my barf-chapped lips, I couldn’t help but think about the various reports you hear about the unsanitary nature of soft-serve frozen yoghurt—specifically the festering bacteria that breeds in the smoothie machines and coats each and every square inch of the frosty sweet stuff.

  “Wharf!!” I heaved. And it was back to the bathroom for me.

  As my head hovered over the sickly lip of the public toilet’s seat, I realized that as much as I had genuinly been looking forward to it, there was no way that I would be able to stand in front of a room and teach. I called my workshop director from the pube-coated floor and told her that, to my grave disappointment, I would be unable to board the plane to teach at the workshop, due to the fact that I was dying in a public restroom at the airport. Although we were both bummed out by the fact, the news was not catastrophic (read: I think I’ll be able to work for that company sometime in the future, even after canceling on such short notice).

  Eventually, I was able to move at a snails pace back to the el. I survived the trip home. Sharing my bed with the fan, I napped and drank plenty of fluids until waking recently for a snack of Chex and Sprite, the official “flu foods” of the Chicago Art Girl household. Currently I’m still not feeling very well, but at least my flu’s abated enough to blog, eh? How else could I gross more people out than I did at the airport? Since I am not a star of a reality TV show, it seems that the Internet is my best bet for this challenge. So, tell me, honestly—how gross was this read?

  Wharf!

  • 3:05 am
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