resolutions

I've started a post about Christmas but lack the drive to finish it. So we're moving on to New Year's Eve, folks!

When I was little, I would make one, and only one resolution for the New Year. That resolution was to not throw up. If I could make it 365 days without vomiting victory was mine!

In all of my adult wisdom, this seems like a silly resolution. I now know that there is little to nothing that I can do to prevent myself from vomiting. Clearly, my young self didn't enjoy throwing up. [In fact, I remember one instance when I was in high school that I got sick in the night, ran into the bathroom, violently emptied the contents of my stomach, went to go back to bed and passed out on the bathroom floor. My brother had just had knee surgery, and my dad ran out of his room, thinking that it was my brother that fell, and when he saw it was only me, went back to bed. I continued to sleep on the cool bathroom tile until the morning]

Imagine my dismay, when, this morning I broke my unspoken New Year's resolution. Now I'm not sure if I broke the 2009 or the 2010 resolution, because it's on the eve of the eve of the new year -- but as it happens, I vomited this morning. Big time.

Sometime during my high school years I developed migraine headaches. I was tested for lupus and all sorts of other things, and it was determined that I just got migraines, and bad ones. More often than not they made me nauseated and I couldn't stand any smells. If I took my medication and slept it off, I was usually back in the game.

I no longer get them as severely as I did a decade ago, but I still occasionally get them -- and today was that day.

I woke up this morning to get ready for swim practice and had a raging migraine. I took my shower and started to get ready, all the while feeling sick, but I thought nothing of it.

And then I got the mouth sweats. Ugh. The mouth sweats. I hate them. Knowing that I didn't have anything in my stomach, I took a few sips of water, because really, it's better to throw something up than to just dry heave, at least in this girl's opinion.

And throw up I did. I called my assistant coach and told her I couldn't make it to practice, on account of my violent vomiting, and climbed onto the couch. [I always hate calling people to tell them that you're sick and can't make it someplace. I always feel like they think I'm playing hookie -- and while I've done my fair share of that, this was decidedly not one of those times.]

The majority of the morning was spent on the couch watching, of all things, the Food Network, and intermittent runs to the bathroom. Since I wasn't eating anything, and drinking very little, it was mostly the depths of my stomach surfacing.

On a plus side -- I was drinking ginger ale and I must say it was a pleasant surprise to have sweet tasting vomit instead of the bitter, acidic stinging vomit that one is accustomed to.

I finally decided to take more than the recommended amount of Advil right after one of my episodes in an attempt to quell my headache. I willed myself to sleep and woke up an hour later, only slightly hungover from the days prior activities.

Since then I have kept nearly a full can of ginger ale down and a cup of ramen noodles.

So on the eve of the eve of the new year, you can bet one of my resolutions will be -- one that I can do nothing about, yet will myself every year to keep it.