So far the creation of life has manifested itself in Sara as copious amounts of vomit. She tells me that she throws up between 1 and 11 times daily. Cold, fresh air is particularly noxious, though an outdoor temperature of exactly 4°C causes her no trouble at all. She apparently has little vomit reflex control, and has recently been known to unleash profusely in unexpected and very public places. The other day, for example, she threw up with such uncontrolled volume on the sidewalk outside a subway station that she got it all over her hands and coat and had to wipe herself down with a copy of the Renter’s News after. She heaved so forcefully in an LCBO parking lot that she peed herself a little, and not 10 minutes later, already smelling like vomit and urine, she puked again behind a dumpster in the parking lot of Jumbo Burger. It seems that not once has any good Samaritan stopped to ask if she is okay as she kneels spitting up in gutters and similar, and is accordingly convinced that people have come to regard her as a homeless alcoholic rather than lady with a baby - or two as the case may be. I think she’s too well dressed for anyone to believe she is homeless; but perhaps she is not far off on the alcoholism, considering at this point she still doesn’t look even a little bit pregnant. Quite the opposite: she’s lost about 7 pounds so far, thus proving that bulimia may really be the answer to good weight management. And giving up drinking, of course. Think of all those delicious calories that are going unconsumed.
While she has not said so out loud, I’m reasonably certain that Sara’s desire for me to drink wild berry coolers last weekend was a design on her part for me to share in the more bilious part of her incubation experience, and that she secretly entertained visions of me expelling magenta liquid over the side of the chairlift when snowboarding the following day. I did not throw up … this time… but it occurred to me that the fatigue, the bloating and the nausea associated with early pregnancy are not dissimilar to the symptoms of a vicious hangover – which brought other displays of public puking to mind. The knocked up don’t have a monopoly on it, after all.
There was one incident following a night of hard drinking, when taking a cab home, in start and stop traffic, with an acidic hangover, I had to insist the driver pull over so that I could throw up. Before the cab even came to a full stop, I spilled out the door, landing on my knees in the gutter, and proceeded to hurl violently into a sewer drain. The cabbie was unconcerned.
One particular favourite involves a bathrobe my parents gave me for Christmas which required some alteration. My mother took me back to the store of purchase one morning for fitting. I had been out until about 5 a.m. the night before, consuming what must have been a very irresponsible amount of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. The heat in the store was... I'll just say tropical, and I was dressed warmly for the winter weather, and sporting a thick bathrobe, waiting for the store clerk to pin up the terry cloth to the desired hem length. So first I started to sweat. Drip with sweat. Sweat which was unfortunately about 10% saline and 90% pure alcohol. (I can still see myself in cartoon form with little lines wavering all around representing the liquor fumes emanating from my body). What felt like hours, but was in fact about 2 minutes later, I got a little faint, my stomach churned, and I tore blindly from the store, still in half-pinned bathrobe, just in time to projectile vomit into a planter outside. Right in front of my dad who had chosen that precise moment to come join us. Both of my parents were unconcerned.
This didn’t happen to me (I swear) but there was a time in high school when quite a lot of us were camping out and partying in a back field at the farm of one of our friends, and one of our number, feeling a bit sick, and believing herself stealthy, crept away from the group in order to vomit quietly against a fence. Unfortunately for her, she chose an electric fence, and liquids being the sly conductors that they are, she had burns on her lips for more than a week. Everyone involved was unconcerned.
***
Wild berry coolers were surprisingly hard to come by. It was only through my dedication/determination, together with the patience of friend with car that I found any at all – 90 minutes, 1 Wine Rack and 4 liquor stores later. Leaving me to speculate as to whether limited availability is a government ploy to keep such beverages out of the hands of the teen-aged girl target market. I experienced a wave of nostalgia for high school with my first sip, which was a little strange: it was not until I was an older and more seasoned and discerning drinker that I ever sampled coolers of any kind. Even then, it was purely as a cost saving measure, as the research skills I developed in university resulted in an understanding that a 2 litre bottle of Grower’s Cider cost less than a 6 pack of beer and at 7% alcohol was more likely to have the desired euphoric effect.
In honour of a significant amount of blueberry vomit that Sara projected all over a snowbank outside of her office building, this weekend I shall drink blueberry ale, served at a temperature of exactly 4°C.
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