Turn Your Head and Offer Way Too Much Information

Not that you asked (and trust me, that phrase will set the tone for this post), I haven't posted in a little while because I've been busy getting diagnosed with what is officially the silliest sounding disease ever...wait for it...Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome. The long and short of it is that about every six months I start heaving and, as the name implies, can't stop until I sally forth to a hospital for my intervenous cocktail of choice on such occasions--liquid phenergan.

The first time this happened was Christmas 1999. I assumed I was allergic to the pine tree-dotted resort in the Catskills where I was spending the holidays. The last time it happened was at this past fall's Clemson-Virginia Tech football game. (That's my little gameday souvenier from the Montgomery General Hospital in the picture.) While I would have liked to have assumed I was allergic to bad football and Hokies, I knew otherwise. After that incident I decided six years of this foolishness was enough and it was time to figure out what was going on. So I recently turned myself over to the folks at Johns Hopkins. (It's like a spa with doctors. And needles. And scary radiation tests. But seriously, other than that, it's awesome.) So it appears that CVS, the disease named after a drugstore, is my little cross to bear. Which in the grand scheme of health maladies is like having doctors tell you that you're going to break a nail every six months. (That is, in my case. I should note that for some who get this--typically little kids--it can be very serious.)

I share all of this not to make you say "Ewww gross," and do that sneer thing you do with your right nostril. Rather, it is to make you aware of this illness in case you too have evenings of non-stop heaving that you can't attribute to bad shellfish or too much champagne. I'd make yellow rubber "Pukestrong" bracelets, but frankly I think since I and about 10 other people have this thing, I'm not sure I'd break even.