So, my kid has a stomach virus.
And I have a paralyzing phobia of vomit.
emetophobia affects 0.1% of the population1, but judging from how many people go oh my god I have that too when I talk about it, it feels like more.
Just to be clear, emetophobia isn’t “I hate vomiting” or “being sick is the worst ever” or “watching someone puke makes me puke, too.” When I tell people I’m emetophobic I often hear stuff like “lol same I hate puking” or “nobody likes vomit.” Really? Seriously? Wow nobody ever told me this! Breaking news, throwing up sucks.
But then there are the people who truly get it. Those of us who still have to force ourselves to write out the word “vomit” because just the sight of the word can send us into a panic spiral. Those of us who wouldn’t leave the house or go into a restaurant or grocery store or school if there was a norovirus outbreak. Who develop eating disorders because we decide if we never eat, we can’t get food poisoning, and we won’t have anything to throw up.
Emetophobia is me asking my dad to read every book before I do, to make sure there aren’t any puke scenes (or, in my case, even the word puke). It’s missing weeks of middle school because I heard someone threw up in a hallway there. It’s panic attacks so bad my entire body shakes and I can’t get out of bed even to go to the bathroom. (Not that I would, anyway, because in a panic attack with emetophobia, bathrooms are very scary places - even your own.)
This time last year, I was in a partial hospitalization program for this phobia.
Yeah, it’s that bad.
And now my kid’s sick.
He hasn’t actually thrown up. To be clear, he’s never thrown up in his entire life, and he’s one and a half years old. I’m extremely jealous.
But based on, uh, other symptoms, he has something truly horrible going on in there.
My partner keeps joking about how our toddler is spraying his norovirus everywhere and I’m spiraling and literally soaking clothes and sheets in buckets of hypochlorous acid and wondering if it’s time to break out the paper isolation gowns+bouffants+gloves+masks+booties I bought just in case I ever have to take care of a baby who really does have noro.
My exposure therapist would say keep going. Do what a normal person would do, which is nothing except some standard-issue sanitizing. But every time I change an exploded diaper I think about how norovirus particles are actually more concentrated in fecal matter than in vomit itself (thanks, late-night pubmed!) and how I’m definitely gonna catch this and fuuuuckkkkk.
This isn’t gonna be one of those posts where I talk a lot about writing through panic, although I kind of am a little bit, because that’s the main thrust of this substack.
Part of why I can’t get so deep into that topic is because just writing this post is about to give me a panic attack and will certainly send me running for my antiemetic prescriptions (zofran, phenergan, reglan, remeron) and benzos the second I hit post.
And yet….
And yet.
My exposure therapist still lives in my brain. Keep living normal life.
For me, normal life means writing. In this case, writing romance, when all I feel capable of writing right now is a treatise on contagion.
We’ll see how well I manage.
But right now? It’s blanket cave time.
And I’m going to let myself do that, because just like I know I need to keep living life, I also know the best way to do that is to give myself the time I need to recover and rest, too. I can take that time for myself, to care for myself, and it will make me a better writer/parent/person in the long run.
You always have to put the mask on yourself before helping others. Or in this case, before writing.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/25115-emetophobia-fear-of-vomiting
Oh my gosh, thank you for writing about this. I feel like no one really knows about emetophobia. I've had it since I was in my teens, and my daughter developed it after having a nasty stomach bug about six years ago. For me, it's tied up with my contamination OCD, and I've found that exposure has been the thing that's helped it the most. I've gone from being a sobbing wreck while cleaning it up, to being able to do it without feeling too overwhelmingly anxious. I do have what is probably a much more rigid way of cleaning when it happens than other people probably do, but progress is progress. It absolutely sucks when you're in the thick of it though and I'm cheering you on from the other side of the world.