Interesting things about Emetophobia

I wrote once before about my really deep fear of throwing up.

(You can read about it here)

Sometimes I have really bad panic attacks, sometimes it's not as intense. But I believe I have a less extreme case of emetophobia, the fear of throwing up.

Sometimes when I'm in the middle of one of those panic attacks, I look up articles, groups and whatnot about the subject. Over time I've picked up a couple of facts that I found interesting that I'm going to share.

(I don't know all my sources, but I learned a lot from this website.)

• People with emetophobia get sick a lot less than people without it. I think it's mostly because they don't give in to nausea, they fight throwing up as much as they can.
• They sometimes mistake normal, everyday feelings in the stomach to be nausea.
• "In a recent Internet survey, the average non-emetophobic reported feeling nauseated 15.6 times per year when they did not actually vomit. The average emetophobic reported nausea 119 times a year! This is due to a few emetophobics -- these people who almost never vomit -- reporting daily, and
  even constant, "nausea." " - Emetophobia FAQ Pages

If I didn't have to live with it, I'd think it was a very interesting phobia.

BUT LUCKILY, that's not what I'm dealing with these days. I do have a very sick boyfriend. He's got the cough, fever, aches, and all kinds of other strange feelings. It's not fun to have, but it's not something I'm scared to catch.

I'll be glad when it's over. It's not fun being kept up all freaking night when people are sick.

Emetophobia

It's February already.

I could recap January, but nothing too exciting happened. It sort of went out with a bang. I had to pick up a certain boyfriend of mine who was sick at work. Which immediately send me into a shaking fit.

I have some form of emetophobia. It's not so severe that I change my regular lifestyle to avoid getting sick. I don't repeatedly wash my hands. I avoid eating anything that could be near its expiration date. I have panic attacks when people near me have the flu. I'm fine when people are sick due to alcohol or hangovers, because I know I can't catch that. The only time I ever throw up is when I have to flu (or those rare times I drink too much).

I'm not as bad as I used to be. My panic attacks are rare anymore. But with my boyfriend being sick, and him being someone I can't avoid since we not only share an apartment, we share a bed, it just made me that much more crazy.

I wasn't thinking about it. In my head, I felt fine, I managed not to worry. It started with a weird pain in my stomach. Not even a sick feeling, just a weird pain. It escalated from there. I kept feeling very warm, then very cold. I could calm myself down, but then suddenly my body temperture would seem to jump as if I'd been lit on fire and I would get so close to throwing up, before I could calm myself down. I managed to calm down around midnight, and try to sleep but I was in and out of sleep all night, then again this morning. I still have yet to eat a normal amount of food since yesterday around 2pm. It's not good for my body.

But that's my panic attack of January 31st story. Being terrified of throwing up is probably the worst thing I go through. I just find it so weird that the human mind can convince itself that its sick, and make the symptoms appear, without actually being sick. That how it tricks me.

But otherwise, January has been a decent month.

But on a less scary note, I found out what my baby will look like if I were to have a girl.



She's kind of cute. I don't think she looks like either of us at all though.