JUST BEING A PIG

I have real bad motion sickness issues. I’ve been accused of “milking it” when I travel in a car, always demanding to sit up front (in vans when on press trips) and usually need to drive myself whenever possible. But I don’t make it up. I have to take Dramamine when I snorkel and I still get sick. I have to take Dramamine to ride roller coasters and the other week, I was very upset to think I needed to start taking it to swim laps in a pool.

After only 40 laps, I was so sick I almost threw up. I swim at my friend, Susan’s pool, which is quite small and so I have to swim 90 laps to get a half a mile in. She converted to salt water instead of chlorine and I was wondering if that was making me sick. Or drinking too much of the pool water when I  breathed. I came home that night and spent a good portion of time on the web investigating. Here, it is not as uncommon as you would think.

They suggested wearing ear plugs so you don’t get water in your ears. To only breathe from one side. Or, to try breathing from both sides. Or, to hold your breath longer (that’s confusing!). I could try to focus on a spot at the other side of the pool. I could eat protein before I swam. Or try carbs. Or swim or an empty stomach or make sure I had food in me. I had just come from picking blueberries at the local blueberry farm and I was grossly belching up blueberry fumes while I swam. It was all so confusing. I swam in competition for 10 years as a youngster and love to exercise in water when it is 90- 100 degrees. I was worried that this one more change that was evolving in my body as I grew older and I thought it sucked.

But when we returned to the blueberry patch the other night and I watched my son, Bryce try to break his record for the most amount of berries he could cram into his mouth (a few years ago it was 35 and it was waaaaaaay more this year). You can eat as many as you like while you pick and they are so plump and juicy and organic!  I told him that I was stuffing a lot in myself the other week before I went swimming.

“Is that the day you got so nauseated?” he asked.
“Yep.”

“Well, no wonder you wanted to puke. You were just being a pig.”

Takes one to know one, I guess.

I am happy to report that I have just returned from Susan’s pool and got 90 in (laps, not berries) and have no trace of nausea. Must have been the masses amounts of blueberries I consumed. Mystery solved.   

By the way, can anyone guess how many Bryce shoved in? It was close to the amount of laps I swim!! (I was told not to blog about this, but once again there is that old saying when you live with a writer , “If you don’t want it written about, don’t let it happen.”