Whenever I was getting better after a childhood stomach upset, the first thing my Mum would give me was Lucozade*.
So now I like to drink it anytime!
*Mods, I thought this might be a purely UK product, so gave a commercial website reference. if this is unwanted, please delete link.
I have to pee before running errands–no matter if I need to or not. So many years of telling the kids to do so and of being a “good role model” I guess.
I do get what Contrapuntal is saying. Certain “cure the ill” items from my childhood make me feel better–not worse. Bactine, for instance. That green and white plastic bottle is almost enough to make the burn/itch/ouchie go away all by itself. Ginger ale and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup make my cold feel a whole lot better as an adult–maybe because they offered me such comfort as a kid. And don’t get me started on those sweet, cherry cough drops (Smith Brothers or Ludens); I could be in third stage labor and passing a kidney stone simultaneously and those things would soothe the agony just by the smell!
Despite my best efforts to be angry, I seem to have ended up with a MPSIMS thread instead of a pit thread. Can I ask a mod to move it?
No medicines, but I’ll never drink another screwdriver.
btw: I love the candy that tastes like Pepto.
Baby powder and other particular scents that are associated with baby products–like the perfumes in baby wipes–don’t smell good to me because of these associations. Instead, they all make me think of vomit and poop.
And any particular scent of deodorant used for too long will, eventually, simply smell like sweat to me.
Mental associations can be surprisingly strong. I feel ya, Reyemile.
My dentist (who was my dentist from ages 5-23, so I had a loooong span of time of seeing him) used this pina colada flavored stuff to numb your gums before giving you a shot. It worked but now whenever I smell that pina colada smell I immediately get nauseous and afraid for a moment. By themselves pineapple and coconut are wonderful things, but together they immediately conjure up images of having my teeth drilled.
This probably isn’t the same thing, but the first time I got drunk I got incredibly hammered. Like, throwing up and everything. I don’t remember much of that night.
Anywho, it was off rum. Now, just the smell of that stuff gets me nauseous.
Way back when I was a kidlet the family went on a long drive (seemed long to me anyway) to visit one grandmother or the other every weekend. On most of those weekends my mother would make blueberry pancakes for breakfast. I always got car sick on these drives and spent the trip barfing into a plastic bag. (I was never allowed to skip breakfast.) As a result I couldn’t eat blueberries for the next thirty years. My throat would close up and I swear I just couldn’t force myself to swallow the things.
Brains are weird.
That’s only part of it - with enough repetition, the dopaminergic system learns to spike at the time of CS onset. You should start feeling better immediately after drinking the pepto, although it won’t be due to the effects of the pepto itself, of course. If you’ve come to associate the sight, smell and taste of pepto with with barfing, there are several things you can do. First, cover the pepto bottle in a neutral color, and plug your nose when you gulp it. Immediately follow the pepto with a good chaser. It will take several repetitions to unlearn this. If that’s not enough, I suggest finding a good porno website and masturbating up until the point of orgasm, and then taking the pepto. If this turns into a pink nasty mess of vomitgasm, don’t say you weren’t warned.
ps: this may ruin your sex life.
I don’t like to drink coffee for this very reason. It tastes like last minute term papers and early mornings to me.
I find the taste of Pepto Bismol and cough syrup and baby aspirin comforting. I was rarely sick as a child, so maybe I associate them with extra attention from my mother.
I bought some Bactaid a while back, and the first time I sprayed it on my kid’s scraped knee, the smell of it made me smile.
For years my wife couldn’t take pills with water. Some sort of flavored juice or cola was required. She remembers the orange-flavored baby asprin she used to gag on when she was a kid and it took us years and years to get her weaned from this association. She can take pills with water now, but she still gets the baby-asprin orange taste memory trigger when she does.
For me, as an asthmatic, it was the primatene pills. Little yellow pills which were horribly bitter. My dose was half a pill, so we’d cut one in half and any protective coating it had to cushion you from the bitterness was gone. I can’t count the number of times I gagged on those things, and towards the latter part of my asthma-afflicted childhood, I swore they made me sicker.
Enjoy,
Steven
Ditto on the 7-up. Also Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, which I only eat when absolutely nothing else will stay down.
You know what I learned the first morning I lived in a college dorm? If you tend to dive for the snooze button on your alarm clock when it goes off, and your alarm clock rests on a nightstand to the right of your bed, you should pick the dorm bed that is NOT flush against a cement wall on the right side. That’s what I learned.
I must always use the bathroom in a bookstore. I could have just relieved myself in the ashtray at the door. It doesn’t matter. As soon as I get into the bookstore, my bladder is full and must be emptied nownownow.
If it’s a small news shop, like at the airport, leaving the store will remove the need. A Barnes and Noble, though, where walking out will take more than a minute, and I’m doomed. Must find bathroom.
<snort> 
Also, awesome user name.
Coffee and musicals for me.
When I was growing up my mom used to make instant coffee and leave a few coffee crystals on the bread board.
I would make a tuna sandwich (not tuna fish) and have concentrated coffee flavor in my white bread with tuna. 
While watching both the Wizard of OZ and the Sound of Music (at different times) I came down with the flu each time.
So now much to the amazement of my SO, I can’t even smell coffee without a wave of nausea or watch any musical without running a fever and getting sick for days.
MacGyver
Grape flavored chewable tylenol and the smell of my parents bedspread are enough to make me sick. They remind me of coming home sick from school with the most godawful migraines and laying in their bed. It was a once a week thing for many years.
Oooh, another one. My brother one day had eaten several peanut butter sandwiches and proclaimed that if he even sees more peanut butter he’ll puke. Me, half thinking he was joking (or rather thinking, hmmm maybe’s he’s only half joking) shoved the peanut butter jar in his face. Wanna guess what he did, yup, puked. To this day, some 17ish years ago, he still won’t go near peanut butter.