Without getting too graphic (but you’ve been warned anyway), my son was sick the other night and dealing with the results made me wonder about the mechanics, so to speak, of vomiting. He ate a pot pie at about 6pm Sunday night. At about 4am, he threw up obvious pieces of carrots from it. At around 8am, he tried eating a little applesauce. At around 10am, he threw up a little bit again, this time with peas from the pot pie in it.
I was under two assumptions, at least one of which must be mistaken: that food only stayed in your actual stomach for less than an hour before passing into the intestines and that, when you threw up, you emptied the contents of your stomach. How deeply does your “stomach” go when you vomit? He was expelling food swallowed well over 12 hours before. And can food sort of pass by other food during the process? It felt like he didn’t vomit much of the applesauce but the peas came out. But I’d accept that the semi-liquid nature of the applesauce just meant it looked like unidentifiable fluid when it came out. Also, I can’t claim to have really investigated the contents
Good news is that he’s back to being full of vim and vigor.
Ok this might be wrong but from what I know the stomach is not one open space like in anatomy charts, it is basically closed when empty and when you eat it closes around the mass of food and liquid. So I guess you could have two different masses eaten apart being worked on by different sections of stomach, I guess this because like your son I have vomited and then vomited later only with the later vomit bringing up food in me the whole time.
When you eat a meal of mixed substances, the stomach will begin to break down items both by chemical and by mechanical means. Different substances are reduced at different rates; those that are well broken down are in a liquid form. The sphincter muscle at the bottom end of the stomach can open and let the fluid portions through while retaining the solid materials for further breakdown. At some point, even the solid materials will get passed on into the intestine, as evidenced by unthawed peanuts or grains of corn. You don’t really have two different sections of the stomach that are separate from one another…it is more like a cement mixer with an ability to pass portions of the contents on as they are adequately processed. If this is applied to your son’s case, you can see how apple sauce would be passed into the intestine, while peas or carrots may be retained, and thrown up later.
Possible. But we’re talking about food swallowed at 6pm the previous evening being expelled at 10am the following day so it was far longer than one hour or three hours.
See gastroparesis. This is a condition in which food remains in the stomach far longer than normal. It may be chronic, or it may be acute.
About ten years ago I woke up one morning not feeling well; an hour later I barfed up the previous night’s dinner, which had apparently not left my stomach in all that time. So, BTDT.