Syzdekistan

On December 20, I made a quick trip to Orange County for a physical for my impending bone marrow transplant (actually a PBSC donation but bone marrow sounds much more cool!). It was a quick and easy trip except for the very end. Basically, I drove to the airport, flew to Orange County, got picked up by a limo, and taken to a cancer center adjacent to a large hospital. There I met a transplant coordinator who quickly shepherded me through several tests and exams at the hospital: an EKG, chest x-ray, and blood and urine samples. Then I went back to the cancer center and had a physical exam by the oncologist there. The procedure was explained in detail and we settled on a date in mid-January for the donation.

Then the limo took back to the airport where I enjoyed a big dinner there. I took some Dramamine for the flight back suspecting that it could be a little bumpy. I was right about the weather. On my flight back home, the trip turned from pleasant to nauseating. I am very susceptible to motion sickness and the flight back was terribly bumpy. It didn’t help that the passenger next to me was whooping with joy for the bigger bumps. I was pretty green and then the Airbus 320 turned 180° onto the final approach on runway 25L. Sweat was pouring from my face, my stomach was churning, and I was literally wishing for death. I wasn’t scared — I was horribly sick. The last straw was the moment before landing when the pilot kicked the big plane into a slip to land crosswind. It was an crazy weird feeling that immediately caused me to fill the airsickness bag that I had been holding ready for the last 30 minutes. I continued to feel very ill during the taxi to the gate and I was the last passenger off of the plane. I took my sickness bag off with me, tossed it in a trash can and then sat, exhausted, in a nearby empty gate area for about 15 minutes. I felt queasy until I went to bed several hours later.

It turns out we landed just about when a cold front passed though. Looking at the weather around 7:20 PM, you can see the winds shifted from the southwest to the north, the temperature dropped by 13 degrees, and the winds were at 30 mph and gusting to 40. I don’t know if it was that windy when we landed but the pilot did some serious gyrations to keep the plane lined up along the centerline.

At one point in my life, I really wanted to be a pilot. Every time I experience motion sickness (I get really sick in cars and on boats, too), I am glad I didn’t become a pilot, astronaut, or marine biologist. However, I am very disappointed that I so easily get afflicted by motion sickness. Of course, there are other reasons not to be a pilot.

This is such a strange malady in that it has a psychological component. I am feeling a bit queasy writing this and once, after a really bad experience on a SCUBA diving boat, I actually felt ill several months later while looking a diagram of the decks of a dive boat. It wasn’t even a picture of a boat but a floor plan in a dive trip brochure! It’s very strange that I can watch a nurse jab a needle in my arm without feeling ill but writing about airsickness or looking at pictures is making me sick.

I’m guessing that there is a deep-seated learned aversion to things that make us vomit. Since the most common reason for vomiting is eating poisonous or spoiled food, there is an evolutionary advantage to remember such foods so we can avoid them in the future. I think most people have met someone who avoids a food (or an alcoholic beverage) that sickened them them in the past. Just the thought or smell of the food causes them to feel sick and avoid it even though they know it is OK to eat. Perhaps that same trigger is working in me as I remember that flight. In any case, I am done writing and remembering. I need to go lay down for a while.