The night after Thanksgiving, I had a nasty case of food poisoning, during which I threw up a few times. The first time was obviously the pancakes I’d eaten about three hours earlier, with nothing else mixed in. Later, I had several rounds of the Ghost of Thanksgiving (Recently) Past, the last of which came nearly 24 hours after eating it. (I hadn’t eaten anything since first becoming sick, and it was pretty obvious what things were.) So, I have a bunch of questions: How far back in your system does vomiting pull things from? If it’s not pulling stuff up from my intestines, how were the pancakes kept separate from the turkey? Does being sick to one’s stomach stop the normal digestive stuff from happening? If not, how could things be distinguishable a day after eating them?
Wow, that’s pretty gross. Normally, food leaves the stomach in about 2 hours. cite. To have stuff there from 24 hours ago means there was a whole lot of nothing happening in your stomach - not the usual order of things.
Generally, the stomach is fairly still until you start eating. Then it starts squeezing and relaxing, mechanically churning your food to break down the big bits while also secreting various chemicals that break down the food further. The broken down food gradually squirts through a valve and into the small intestine. Like I said, by 2 hours, this is generally finished, and the stomach rests again until you put more food in it.
Since there was identifiable stuff in your vomit, that means that your stomach wasn’t moving around at all, or very little, since you had Thanksgiving dinner. When you had your pancakes, they fell into an already full stomach that wasn’t churning. So, just like when you scrape food into a garbage can, it made another layer on top of the Thanksgiving stuff. When you vomited, a valve on the top of your stomach opened, and the contractions of your esophagus pushed the top layer of food up and out. The valve, which is supposed to be one way, recovered it’s strength and clamped shut again before the turkey could get out. Until it weakened again, and let out the next layer of food.