Vomitting

[nomorepanic]

Susan

I am so pleased that you did it - well done. I am glad the fizzy drinks worked too.

Just one thing I wanted to say on fizzy drinks - I love Lucozade (the fizzy one) but read the ingredients yesterday and it contains CAFFEINE. I gave caffeine up 3 years ago and was aware it was in coke but not in Lucozade. So watch out for the ingredients, just a thought ....

Nicola

[Meg]

Hi Nic,

I would be just as concerned for the massive sugar hit that surges through you when you have lucozade.

Meg

[nomorepanic]

Meg

I have never noticed that as a problem to be honest. I always thought that a bit of sugar would be good. No side-effects so far but I am cutting the lucozade down cos of the caffeine.


Nicola

[TheGodSplinter]

Hi...

I suffer from severe emetophobia (upchuckophobia?) and I have, now, for around 20 years. My entire life has been swung around to aim for a reduced likelihood of throwing up, or even of feeling nausea.

There are meds that your doc could be giving you (stand-by drugs; not daily-takers), but, in some cases, docs are reluctant to prescribe them. The meds best applied are Stemetil (mostly used as a muscle relaxant) and Maxolon (which accelerates your stomach's emptying) both of which can be the end of nausea and vomiting.

My doc wouldn't give me what I needed (Stemetil), so I went to see a referral psychologist and spent months explaining to him how my social life would take off far more healthily if I felt it to be safe to mix with people, again. He wrote a letter to my doc and my doc had a prescription ready, for Stemetil, for me, within a day or so. It's a shame, though, that the doctor didn't believe me without the aid of a psychologist. Doctors appear unable to see that anxiety sufferers very often have staggeringly good insights into what they require, to make their lives easier to live. If more doctors suffered from panic attacks, our own suffering of anxiety/panic attacks would become less, and shorter-lived.

There are other tricks you can pull on your nervous system to reduce the chances of nausea turning into vomiting.

1. Heat application to the part of the abdomen immediately behind the navel (scrambles the nervous signals before they can reach the brain and, therefore, stop the brain from sending "throw up" signals back.) This is a centuries-known, "old wives'" way of dealing with children with upset stomachs.

2. Massive input of fresh oxygen (open windows are all you need, for this.) Don't use speed, just use capacity. The last thing that you want, now, is to hyperventilate...just to increase your blood-oxygen level.

3. Burping through clenched teeth, with your head leaning back, and your tongue very still, makes it almost impossible to create an unwanted throwing up session during a frightening nausea.

4. And, believe it or not, you can actually "FOOL" your gastro-intestinal system into thinking that you've already thrown up and that it can relax, now. The problem is...this one is not safe for severe emetophobes, so I'll just glance off it. BY DELIBERATELY MAKING YOURSELF DO SMALL "ALLOWED" RETCHINGS, WHEN IN A SITUATION IN WHICH YOU ARE *SURE* YOU'RE GOING TO THROW UP, SOON...you can actually fool your body's defence mechanism into thinking that the throwing up has been done. Seriously! (Even some British S.A.S. personnel are taught this, because their lives may depend on not leaving behind them the smell of vomit for trackers/dogs to pick up on.) The result is that the body's "empty this stomach, now!" signals are sent further and further apart because it's convinced that your vomit has already left. (This effect is half of the reason why burping has such a good effect in the reduction of nausea!)

5. The 5th is simpler, but is not always a good idea, unless you are utterly convinced that you are about to throw up, in which case you have nothing to lose, trying it. One pint of very warm water (another belly heat source, also) taken in, gradually, for as long as you can hold off your vomiting. This has the effect of gently opening the sphincter at the bottom of the stomach, even a fraction earlier than it normally would. Then, the disturbance, in your stomach, slowly makes its way out, through that sphincter and is far less likely to be thrown up, or is less throwing up to do. The other benefit of this pint of warm water is that, should vomiting happen, you have a better chance of properly clearing the stomach contents in one, or two, bursts. And, the water weakens the stomach acid and reduces throat-burn on the day and on the day after that. (I imagine there would be no reason not to add some Sodium BiCarbonate to the water...even just a pinch that is so small, it's impossib