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| pre-boarding condition |
The fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler is one of those unlucky
travelers who has an inner ear affliction which causes her dizziness and nausea
when she is moving. If she can’t see the
horizon or get fresh air on her face, or guzzle a quart of Grey Goose before
boarding an aircraft, a boat, or a fast moving escalator, she is in
trouble. In no time at all she will turn
a pasty blue color and start looking for a trash can or toilet to puke in to. She’s been known to get air sick when watching
the movie “Top Gun” or sea sick from eating Captain Crunch cereal.
The TSA has her profile in the National Traveler Data Base as a
known “projectile vomiter”. The Airlines,
now aware of her problem, proactively print her boarding pass on a little white
stomach distress bag which has a dotted line across the top with the
words: “do not over fill” printed on
it. Her seat assignment is closest to
the toilet, in Row I, seat 6 (get it?: I
sick) On most planes they now have
installed a clear glass panel between her seat and the rest of the passengers,
similar to the sneeze guard you’d see in the salad bar of a buffet
restaurant. The boy in the bubble was
not this isolated.
Recently we were flying home from a trip to San Diego. I was sitting near the window, Wifey was in
the middle seat and a fellow passenger was to her right. Somehow the topic came up about her getting
air sick. I think I may have innocently brought
it up. I told him about the time we
hired a small plane to fly us around Mt. McKinley when we were in Denali
National park in Alaska. We had waited
two days for the weather to clear in order to make that flight and my wife was
very anxious to take the trip. We
finally did get airborne, but she almost immediately got air sick. I think she
went thru a dozen stomach distress bags.
There is now a permanent stain on the glacier we flew over from what she
ate for lunch before our flight.
Anyway, I was telling our fellow passenger about her proclivity
to be air sick, and perhaps embellished
the story, a bit. Then I handed him one
of those air sick bags and said “here, you will need this. She always pukes to
her right”. I could tell from the expression on his face that he thought he was
in the middle of an Ebola virus outbreak.
Many years ago, she and I went deep sea fishing in Mexico. Wifey knew she needed motion sickness
medicine but she may have taken too much.
She was curled up in a fetal position on the deck, her face an ashen
blue color. She was nearly passed out
from the Dramamine. I don’t know how
long she laid there, but long enough to get a sunburn on half her face. I guess I should have been paying more
attention to wifey’s plight, but this was an expensive charter and I was very
busy not catching anything. In hindsight, I should have done the proper
husbandly thing and flipped her over every half hour. I think one of the other fishermen finally
thru a towel over her to keep the Fish and Game inspector from coming aboard
and arresting us for illegally poaching a rare blue faced dolphin.
Her sunburn later reminded me of the Richard Dreyfuss character
in the movie “Close Encounters” that got a sunburn on half his face from
looking up at the spacecraft’s lights.
My wife’s face was quite a sight, half of it was red from the sunburn
and the other half was blue from the motion sickness. She looked like she was painted up and ready
to go to a college football game. We finally
had to coax her away from the edge of the boat because we were afraid of sharks
and did not want her to add any more chum to the water.
These days, Wifey takes Industrial strength motion sickness
pills to get her thru the ordeal of a trip.
These pills are so strong they would tranquilize a dozen would-be jihadist
hijackers, except they are the non-drowsy version. So now, instead of sleeping,
she is wide awake and fully aware of her nausea. But at least she does not do the Linda Blair “Exorcist”
kind of head spinning, then across the room puking that I have come to
expect. Poor thing.
