My Emetophobia |
For the past nineteen years, my life has been dominated by emetophobia, an irrational and debilitating fear of vomiting. This is the story of how I came to have this phobia, how if affects my life and how I cope with having it. Unlike many phobics, I can remember a time when I didn't have my phobia. Most phobics acquire their fears when they are very young indeed, and cannot remember what happened to them to make them so afraid of something - the barking dog or the fall into a swimming pool that sparked off their fear of dogs or fear of water. But up until I was seven years old, I clearly remember not being afraid of being sick (that's being sick in the English sense, not the American sense, just to clear up any confusion). In my pre-phobia years, I was a happy, bright child, generally fearless to the point of recklessness and always willing to give something new a go. My mother has a photograph of me when I was five years old, which she cherishes, because she says it captures the essence of how I was before I became emetophobic: I am standing on a chair, singing and bashing away at a toy tambourine. I think I was taking part in a show that my then eight-year-old sister was putting on for our grandparents. I look like any other boisterous child, without a care in the world. But when I was seven, I was sick for the first time (obviously not the first time, as babies are constantly at it, but it was the first time that I was aware of what was going on). I remember having a dreadful stomach ache for the whole day at the church's summer school that I went to, which got steadily worse. I had to visit the optician with my mother that day, and I can remember lying on the back seat of the car, clutching my stomach in pain and groaning. My mother was anxiously asking me all the time whether or not I felt sick, but as I had never been sick before, I didn't know, so I just said no. When we got home, Mum asked me if I wanted anything to eat, and I asked for some fruit. She gave me a slice of melon, which I ate, but it tasted funny. I asked Mum why the melon tasted like peas, but she didn't answer me - she walked quickly out of the room. At about half seven that night, it happened. I felt very hot, and then suddenly very cold, and I called out to my mother that I thought I was going to be sick after all. Mum literally ran out of the room, and Dad sat with me as it happened. I think I have blanked most of what actually occurred from my memory, but I do remember that Mum wasn't there. When it was over, I was shaking and sweating with fear, and clung to my father, begging him not to let it happen again. I slept in my parents' bed that night with my Dad - it happened once more during the night - and I cried the whole night for my mother: she slept in my room while my Dad stayed with me. That night (August 22nd 1983) was the night my whole life changed. From that night on, I was terrified of being sick again. If someone at school said they felt sick, I was paralysed with fear. If they actually were, I couldn't get out of the room fast enough. In the next couple of years, I was sick twice more (on November 4th 1986 and March 14th 1987 - the dates are forever etched into my memory) and those instances only made me more terrified. I started to show classic symptoms of an emetophobe, and it started to rule my life. The first thing to develop was the fussy eating. I refused to try any new foods in case they made me ill, and foods that I had eaten the night before or just previous to an episode of illness were off the menu - chicken in barbecue sauce, melon and chocolate éclairs especially terrified me. Even foods that I knew other people had eaten before they were sick scared me - my sister, who occasionally suffered from travel sickness, once ate a ham sandwich and some chocolate ice cream before being sick in the car, and it was literally years before I could eat them again (I also nearly killed myself on that occasion by trying to jump out of a car going at 70mph on the M6 when she was sick all over the back seat). Soon, I would only eat very plain, bland food, and at my worst, between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, I was surviving on a toasted teacake and a bowl of dry cereal a day. Unsurprisingly my weight plummeted to about seven and a half stone, and I looked skeletal. But my reasoning was that if there was nothing in my stomach, I couldn't be sick, and if I only ate my "safe" foods, then I would be fine. I also developed a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), where I would have to do certain things at certain times to make sure I wouldn't be sick, and I also had what a later therapist told me was termed "magical thinking". This was quite a complicated process where, if I felt sick, I would run through in my head what was different now to the last time I was sick, and told myself that because these things were different, I wouldn't throw up (I know it sounds completely crazy, but it did help with the worst of the panic attacks). The worst of my OCD "rituals" was my bedtime ritual. Because, on two occasions, I had woken up very early in the morning and been sick, I had to make sure I did the same things every night before going to sleep in order to "guarantee" my non-illness the next day. My ritual went like this:
Only by doing all this could I safely fall asleep. If I woke during the night - especially if I woke at around 4am - I would invariably have a panic attack, and the only way I could calm down was to repeat my ritual. It also affected my school life to some extent, although I wasn't as bad as some emetophobes, who find it difficult to leave the house. I did find assemblies very difficult to endure, especially after Davina Hall was sick during one in my third year. But luckily (or that's how I saw it), I broke my coccyx during gymnastics when I was about 13, so for two years I had to sit on a chair at the side with the teachers - with no one behind me who could be sick on me. When I was sixteen, however, my mother talked to me. You may have been wondering why she ran away that first time I was ill, and how on earth she hadn't spotted her underweight daughter and taken her to the doctor. Well, for a start, anorexia wasn't particularly well known back then, but the real reason was that Mum knew exactly what was wrong with me - because she has emetophobia herself. She finally decided, when I started to lose so much weight, that something needed to be done, and so she talked to me about my fear. Eventually, after much gentle persuasion on her part, I agreed to go and see the doctor. Very luckily, my doctor at the time, Dr Nugent, was a lovely, caring woman who understood my problem immediately. She put my name down on the waiting list for the Children's Centre, which dealt with children and young adults with mental problems. I was a bit taken aback at this, as I hadn't really thought of myself as having a mental problem, but I figured that if it would help get rid of this all-consuming fear, then I would give it a go. It took about a year for my first appointment to come through, and I remember being very nervous when I went in for the first time with my parents. There were two doctors there, one an older man and the other a young woman. The older man went off with my parents to talk to them about me, while I stayed with the younger woman - this turned out to be Caroline, my cognitive behavioural therapist. I saw Caroline once a week for about nine months, and she helped me immensely. I was scared that she was going to make me watch videos of people being sick or something like that, but she assured me that she would never make me do something that I wasn't comfortable with. All we did was basically talk for an hour each week about how I was feeling, how I'd been that week, whether I'd had a panic attack or not, etc. She taught me relaxation techniques to cope with a panic attack, and we also went through a list I’d compiled of things that frightened me, from the least scary (hearing the word "sick") to the most (actually being sick myself). Caroline got me to do one thing on my list every week until I wasn't scared of it anymore, such as sitting on the sofa that I'd been lying on the first time I was ill, or not running out of the room when someone was sick on television. My time with Caroline was great: she really understood my problem and was a great help to me. But eventually the time came when I had to stop seeing her - she was moving to another Children's Centre in the north east. She'd arranged for me to go to an adult treatment centre a few months later, though, so that I could carry on getting better. I looked forward to going to the new centre, as I'd made such progress with Caroline that I felt that they would be able to cure me for sure. But it was an unmitigated disaster: the man who I saw seemed to have made up his mind what was wrong with me before he'd even met me, and refused to budge from his position even when I told him I didn't think he was on the right track. Caroline had told me that she'd come to the conclusion that my emetophobia was a manifestation of a fear of losing control, which makes a lot of sense to me. (I often feel that things must be done just in the right way - in my right way that is - not because I'm selfish but because I'm worried that if they're not, I might lose control of a situation or something might go wrong. It's not quite the same as being a control freak, but also not entirely alien to that concept either.) Anyway, this new therapist had decided before he saw me that my fear of vomiting was actually a fear of death. What I was scared of was dying, and I was scared of being sick because I was actually scared that I would choke to death. I tried to explain to him that I'm not frightened of dying in the slightest (I never have been: I'm only frightened of death in the sense that I'm frightened of how I will die - I want it to be painless and with dignity, not the long, drawn-out, humiliating procedure that terminally ill people are forced to endure these days). But he wouldn't listen to me - he had his pet theory, he was right and that's all there was to it. Needless to say, I didn't go back to him. I kind of got disillusioned about things after that - plus I left home to go to university, so I would have had to put my name down on another waiting list in Birmingham. I got through my three years at university, and started working in North Wales, where I went to see my new GP about it and asked to be put on a waiting list. He made sympathetic noises, but I never heard anything before I moved away to Manchester. I tried another doctor there, but he told me quite plainly to stop being so silly and grow up. After that, I gave up with doctors. So here I am, aged 26 and still living with my fear. I am a lot better than I used to be when I was younger and can cope in many situations that would have terrified me beyond belief before. I'm almost able to cope with the cat being sick, and people who are sick through food poisoning or being drunk - any vomiting thing that I can't catch is still awful and terrible, but at least I don't have panic attacks for a week after it happens any more. My partner has been sick three times in the six years that we've been together, but on two of those occasions he had a bug, which I could have potentially caught, which caused a bit of upset (including getting my mother over at midnight to take me back to her house 50 miles away). The other time he was drunk, and I'm pleased to say that I wasn't actually scared while it happened - I was absolutely furious that he could be so unthinking as to let himself get that drunk in the first place! But I still live with the fear of being sick myself; I'm just as scared of that as I ever was. I have trained myself out of most of my habits and rituals now, but I still wake up every morning thinking, "Will it happen today?" I haven't been sick (touch wood) for fifteen years now, and I know of people who haven't done it for fifty years, but that doesn't reassure me. Emetophobia is one of the hardest phobias to cure - I haven't heard of anyone who's been fully cured of it, and that knowledge scares me too. Having emetophobia rule my life is bad enough, but knowing that I'll probably spend all my life like this is even worse. |