So umm…I had this new drink called “blue lightning” last night at the casino, with a friend. It was blue gatorade and vodka I believe. I made a mistake of drinking it on an empty stomach and it made me sick. I tried to bolt to the hotel lobby restroom, which is smaller and has less people. I am self-conscious about puking in front of other people. But nope, right in the lobby, a cascade of blue gatorade and bits of o-ke-doke white cheddar popcorn from hours earlier, came rushing out my mouth AND nose. Onto their precious white marble floor! :o My friend wouldn’t stop laughing, but it was awful!
What about you? When was the last time you got drunk at a picnic and puked into an unused bbq pit? Puked in a lecture hall? In a whirlpool, at an apartment clubhouse? Wherever.
June 2005, my first trip to visit my best friend in San Antonio. Spent the day at “The Coast” - aka The Gulf of Mexico - with spray-on sunscreen on a windy day. One of the Top 5 Worst Sunburns of My Life. I really wanted to go to Coyote Ugly, and of course they don’t let you just have a water there (well they do, but not in a glass…) so I had two vodka & cranberries. Waiting for my friend’s husband to pick us up in downtown San Antonio I suddenly get that dizzy feeling…bolt across the street to the garbage can and HURL. (Thankfully the city guys had just emptied said garbage can.)
I was also drinking but this time it impacted my judgement rather than my stomach directly. So I walked to the Chinese buffet and had my normal 3 servings, then noticed that they had just put out a piping hot Sweet and Sour Chicken, and Chinese buffet sweet and sour doesn’t taste good unless it’s fresh, and this batch tasted particularly good, so I had two plates full (on top of the 3 other plates I’d already had.)
When I walked out of the buffet, I felt sick, I walked over to the trash bin and exhaled – exactly one perfectly formed sweet and sour nugget. Then I was completely fine.
During a night on the town, a guy she was not particularly fond of was trying to win her affection by presenting her with a single long-stemmed rose. She was quite tipsy at the time so she leaned over and bit the bloom off the stem and swallowed it whole. The look on his face was priceless…
…but not as priceless as watching her puke up rose petals on the street later that evening.
Unfortunately I have lots of public puking stories.
One of the most memorable happened when I was about sixteen years old and suffering from a hangover. For some reason, Grandma did not think having a hangover was a good enough reason to be excused from church, so I took a couple of pills for the headache and off we went.
When everyone stood up to sing, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t stand because I needed to concentrate my entire being on swallowing repeatedly. My brother, who was enjoying the whole thing immensely, leaned over to me and said, “Julie. Don’t. Puke.”
These magic words caused everything I had ingested the previous day to fly out of my mouth and land on the pew, with an accompanying aroma of used booze. My mortified grandmother and every person in the congregation then strove mightily not to notice as I and my hysterically laughing brother staggered out of the church carrying the sodden cushion.
I’ve only thrown up in public once that I recall. I was at summer camp and had what I think was whooping cough (2 other kids had been diagnosed and I had identical symptoms). This is the kind of cough where you think it will never stop and your ribs are ripping apart. Sometimes, all the hacking will trigger a gag reflex. This happened to me right in the middle of a gravel driveway. I coughed, instantly realized that I had hit something that could not be stopped, staggered off a few steps, and vomited up my whole dinner into the grass. This happened about three more times in the span of two days. Lesson: don’t miss booster shots.
My friend ate a breakfast of Go-gurt and pickles prior to a 3-hour bus ride to Philadelphia. This is not a good idea. I still recall dragging her frantically through an I-95 service plaza trying to get to the women’s bathroom as partially digested Go-gurt and pickles spewed through her fingers onto the floor of the Roy Rogers seating area. The other diners were thrilled.
After a particular high school musical closed, we had a cast party in a rented space. There was a lot of beer and hard cider, and I was imbibing rather freely. But I wasn’t drunk. NoshireeIwashjushtfi hic fi hicfine.
I left the party alone, and right outside the door were two sweet Mormon girls who were apparently appalled at the debauchery going on inside. I attempted to be a true gentleman by wishing them a lovely evening. What came out of my mouth was not words, however.
Strolling through the French Market in New Orleans with a hangover isn’t so bad until you hit the seafood section. Luckily I was able to duck out and find a culvert.
Personally: not since I was four or five years old. Had just eaten a meal of spaghetti and meatballs and for some reason it all came back up about twenty minutes later. Onto the kitchen floor. Which said kitchen was full of adult relatives at the time. I was so shocked by what was going on, I kept backing up and backing up, leaving an impressively lengthy trail. Great googly moogly, was I ever mortified.
I’ve seen others let go in public. The oddest one was witnessed from a bus stuck in traffic in Paris. A guy walking alongside the bus suddenly heaved the contents of his stomach into the gutter, hardly breaking stride, then just kept on going as though this was some mildly annoying event that happened all the time.
Change the location to San Francisco about 15 years ago, and that could have been me. My stomach is usually pretty unflappable, but one day, I was walking along, sober as a judge, not a care in the world, when suddenly, my stomach decided the next parking meter needed to be redecorated, but my feet never got a message to stop moving. It was very weird and not even particularly unpleasant.
I got badly sunburnt on a holiday in Tahiti as a teen, and was suffering from heat stroke at the airport. Needing to vomit we were trying to find me something to throw up in, leading to my brother’s classic utterance “ma Soeur est malade, je suis un baguette.”. Clearly influenced by JFK.
About 8 of us went skydiving for a birthday. It was a tandem dive because most of us had never done it before. One of the guys there was strapped to a particularly demented instructor, who spun him a lot during his dive. He wasn’t feel well after that.
On the drive away from the diving range, he and I were in the back of the minivan, me on the outside closer to the door. He suddenly paused, with a very serious look in his face, and said he needed to puke and that it was coming up. I yelled at the driver to stop and then leaped forward to the door and yanked it open with him just inches behind me. I could hear the gurgling sound of his breakfast coming up as I literally dove outside the door. I will forever believe that dashing forward and leaping saved me from being covered in his vomit
While visiting my wife’s aunt about 50 miles from Rio de Janeiro, my wife fed me about thirty different fruits that probably don’t even have names in English, followed immediately by birthday cake and a tall chilled glass of pure sugar cane juice. We then piled into our tiny little car and started the journey back to Rio to another uncle’s house.
About five miles into the drive I realized that I had the mother of all migraines settling in for the duration. I only get one a year, and that’s enough for me. But it was definitely not fine by me at that time and that place: I was the only one in the car who had actually driven on the Brazilian highways before. And it was a standard transmission, a skill my wife is innocent of.
At the ten mile point I finally gave in to the crushing headache and begged my wife’s sister (who has slightly better stick-shift skillz than my wife) to muster up some courage and drive us the rest of the way.
The remainder of the drive was bad. Every five minutes I would tell her to pull over. We always seemed to stop amid bustling crowds of people heading to and fro, pausing to gawk at the gringo who was leaning out the open car door. I didn’t care. I would let loose with everything I thought I had left inside, and then she would drive on.
The roads were cobblestone, with speed bumps every few hundred yards. That didn’t help much. Neither did the unskilled clutch foot of my sister-in-law.
This happened many years ago when I was stationed in San Diego while in the Navy. A couple of buddies and I spent the night drinking way too much. On top of this I had eaten way too much popcorn the bar made available for free.
We left the bar and stopped at a Denny’s to get something to eat. For some reason the smell in the restaurant did not agree with me and my stomach felt like it was on a trapese. I decided to go outside and get some fresh air.
While sitting on the edge of a planter about 20 feet from the door, things got worse and and I let loose a couple times. Needless to say, all that popcorn came back up.
While sitting there trying to compose myself, an older couple came walking up to visit the restaurant. They looked at me then the older woman says “Henry, I don’t think I’m hungry anymore”. They turned around and left. I went back to my buddy’s car and passed out on the back seat.
I have a few non-notable public pukings, but nothing worth bringing up. The one I’ll always remember is someone in a high school math class. He put his hand over his mouth…you know, like when you put your thumb over the hose. It hit opposite corners of the classroom (or at least came within a few feet of the corners)…it shot out really far.
After I fractured my skull when I was 5, I spent 2 weeks throwing up a couple times a day. The first 2 days were especially bad. Basically, any time I moved off the couch, I’d puke. So, I spent all that time just reclining on the couch drinking soup and water. During that time, I succeeded in brainwashing myself so now I am completely incapable of puking. This means, luckily, that I have no public puking stories of my own.
However, when I was in 7th grade, I was sitting in my math class and a girl came in to get her coat out of her locker (this was back when we still had homerooms and most of the lockers were in the homerooms). She was sick and was going home. Before she finished opening the locker, she puked all over herself, the locker, and the desk next to her (which was empty). She then went home. My teacher called the janitor (who NEVER FRIGGEN CAME!!) and continued on with the lesson. The smell was incredibly unpleasant and caused some close calls. Luckily the class ended about 15 minutes later and we all ran out before any pukey repeats happened.
When I was in grade four I ran for a position in the Students Council. It was the day of the speeches and I chose to spend the lunch hour in the library getting ready. Our librarian was kind of militant and if a student chose to be in the library for lunch, then they had to stay the whole hour.
I started to feel a bit strange so I asked if I could go to the washroom. She said no.
As soon as she wasn’t looking I sprinted out the door. I almost made it to the bathroom, about 3 feet from the door I vommited something fierce. There was nobody in the hall, that I saw anyway, so I ran. At the assembely the school was talking about the huge pile of puke in the hall, but nobody knew who it was.
Not public, but during the adoption process for my little sister, I was off school because I didn’t feel well. The doorbell rang and my mother opened the door to our social worker, who was immediately greeted by the slight of me running across the hall spraying puke up the walls from a hand clasped across my mouth. Luckily the social worker was worldly and knew it was stomach flu not child abuse.
When I was eleven we visited relatives in Lincoln, Nebraska. Sunday morning and we’re all in church. It’s summer and the church didn’t have airconditioning. I got nauseous from the heat but made it outside and threw up in the planter next to the church entrance.
Another puking, not exactly public, but in front of a friend. I was in the hospital following kidney surgery. It’s the morning after, I’d eaten nothing in almost 24 hours and now felt well enough to try. The nurse brought me two squares of Jello, one lemon, the other lime. Remember the colors, folks.
So I eat carefully and slowly, one small bite after another. Just as I finish up a good friend walks in, with flowers, books, and cards from other friends. I smile at him weakly, then lean over the bed and start projectile vomiting the Jello. Now you know it’s a real friend when they drop what they are doing and grab the pan for you to throw up in.
Of course later, online, he told our friends I was “doing my best Linda Blair impression”
I’m a champion puker, but probably my all-time most awkward was the morning after a night of apparently heavy drinking. I was pretty hungover, but didn’t throw up until I was almost at work, coming up the Metro escalator. The Dupont Circle escalator, that is, which happens to be 188 feet long. It was a long ride… but to this day I’m not sure if anyone else really noticed.
