Resistance is, Well, You Know

I just went to get a glass of water and saw my half-empty bottle of Pepto-Bismol in the fridge. The hot pink bottle caught my eye and suddenly, it was a stare down. But I won. I slammed the fridge door and bolted back to my bedroom, skidding and sliding in my slippers down the dark hallway before making it safely under the covers.

As a kid, my mom took me to doctor after doctor after doctor. I always had a horrible stomachache. They’d gotten progressively worse. At first it was just a small one, often from milk, so Mom cut milk out of my diet. But the pain continued to increase, until finally I’d have to stay home from school and my brow was thick with sweat. These doctors had no idea what was wrong and all my mom could do was give me Pepto-Bismol to help with the hurt.

My grandma came to visit from Montana around this time, and what I didn’t know was that she had trouble sleeping. Well, Grandma busted me one night guzzling Pepto in the cold, hard light of the fridge. Initially, I’d faked the stomachaches to drink Pepto. That smooth, licorice taste was like the candy I was never allowed to have, so no wonder I started sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to drink more, which eventually caused my stomachaches. So yeah, mom wasn’t too thrilled with me after that.

Well, I still love the taste of Pepto, and I don’t keep it in the house because it’s hard for me to keep my hands off it. But here was a half-gone bottle waiting for me in the fridge, taunting me. My own liquid pink temptation. It probably won’t last the night. At some point, I’ll give in, put this blog down and go grab the bottle. I’ll return, taking shots from that little plastic cup they seal up with the bottle, making it as pleasurable to drink as Highland Park scotch. Then I’ll say “Screw the cup!” and take hits straight from the bottle.

Anyway, here’s the story why it’s waiting for me in the fridge:

It’s Memorial Day Weekend. Everyone’s barbequing and I’m on the rag. Seriously, how could my timing be worse? Three days off and I get stuck with bitchiness on Friday, fatigue on Saturday and cramps on Sunday. Propped up with pillows and a blanket on The Boyfriend™’s couch, I whimper away most of Sunday, whining about what Monday would hold for me: the return of acid rain? Female pattern baldness? M.C. Hammer pants?

Man, I was in a mood. I skulked beneath that blanket, barking out commands to The Boyfriend™: “No, go there. Yeah, on that shelf. Search through that box––no, you went through that one already, the one on the left. That one, yeah. Oh my god, behind you! Jesus, watch OUT! Reload. Good job, baby. Now loot that other corpse. You always forget to loot the corpses. It’s absolutely imperative you don’t forget, because where else are we going to get ammo between here and Rivet City?”

Oh. Guess forgot to mention that I made him play Fallout 3 to entertain me. But if he didn’t have me, the Queen of Bethesda RPGs, he’d have left so many caps on feral ghouls that we would’ve never gotten the Chinese assault rifle repaired and made it through the Capital Wastelands that day. But after ten hours of straight playing, I let him take a break and felt very awkward, yet relieved, that he was fine making dinner without me. My body ached in this strange way and I couldn’t imagine standing in the kitchen, or really even moving around.

Then it was back to entertaining me with the Bloody Mess Perk (“Watch this headshot, sweetie!”), but I started to fade, and even bodies exploding and limbs falling to the four corners of his 50-inch plasma couldn’t keep me interested. I’d been kicking the blanket off and pulling it back on for about an hour when I tumbled off the couch and hobbled to the bathroom, hunched over like Igor from cramping pains and a gut roiling with dinner and stomach acid.

Glad I had my hair in a ponytail because, at approximately 7pm, I lost half of my dinner in his downstairs bathroom. I coughed a bit just as the sound of gunfire ceased.

“Honey? Are you okay?” The Boyfriend™ asks with distracted concern.

“I’m fine! Go back to slaying!”

I rinse my mouth out and stagger back onto the couch. Moaning, I pull the blanket back up, cursing my reproductive organs for functioning properly. The Boyfriend™ asks if it’s the Perk making me sick, or if my incredibly dreaded motion sickness from first person games––strangely absent during Half Life 2 yesterday and now today––had returned. I reassure him that it’s from my period, that sometimes I throw up from the pain. The Boyfriend™ puts Fallout on pause, looks at me, and asks with sad, sad eyes if there’s anything I need or that he can do. No, there’s really nothing, I’ll be better tomorrow, as long as acid rain doesn’t fall.

Fifteen minutes later, the only comforts I have are two things: how cool the porcelain feels against my burning, clammy palms as I clutch the basin of his toilet, and that he has regular maids who do a great job of cleaning said toilet because it could have been oh so much worse each time I shove my head into it. I stay hunched on his cool, brick bathroom floor, drenched in sweat. I don’t know for how long but there’s a tap on the door at some point. He pushes the door open and now I’m thinking I look like a crazed, pinned feral ghoul from Fallout, crouched there on the bathroom floor.

“Honey?”

The words “I’m fine, I’m fine” start to come out but are quickly replaced with vomit rushing up my throat. I kick the door shut with my foot so he doesn’t see me spewing bits of carne asada with a color of liquid I don’t recognize as anything going into me at any point in the last year.

After that, I’m shaking and he’s put video games aside. But how the hell are we going to discuss the moral dilemma of the Tenpenny Tower quest if I can’t stop hurling? is what I’m thinking as I cling to the bowl shivering. This will stop, I reassure myself. I’m done, there’s nothing left in my stomach––ouch, fuck, ouch it’s sore––this is from motion sickness building uuuUUULLP

“Christie, what can I do?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

No, I really wasn’t. My sweat’s so hot and my body’s so cold that my t-shirt flash frozen to my skin. I was like one of those bags of chicken you get in the frozen foods section, a big old sack of icy poultry, slouching on The Boyfriend™’s bathroom floor. Vomiting in front of him. Oh, humiliation. I wanted to crawl into that toilet and pull the lid down after me, because anything was better than looking up at his worried face or hearing his concerned voice through the door. And all the while, my image withers: I was a dainty rose, grown to perfection, with perfect petals that never wilt. I do not have bodily functions, I do not make messes, because girls are lovely little things. But most of all: Girls. Don’t. Vomit.

You know what girls also don’t do? Shit the most god-awful smelling diarrhea that shreds paint off the wall like it was wallpaper. It was midnight. Monday. Acid rain. I wish The Boyfriend™ had wallpaper, because it would’ve caught fire, burning the bathroom and consuming me so I didn’t have to live with the humiliation of what happened next: I started throwing up and having diarrhea at the same time. This happened to me several years ago, and a vicious ER nurse stabbed me with an IV and I passed out on the gurney, followed by throwing up in my sleep for nine hours. So I clawed for water and dumped it down my throat only to throw it up and shit it out about thirty seconds later.

I don’t know how long this lasted, but I rebuffed attempts to take me to the hospital and somehow ended up in the master bathroom. The Boyfriend™ put me to bed (I just can’t believe that. I would never put something so loathsome as Myself With the Stomach Flu into a bed). I vaguely recall the clock reading 2am when I woke up feeling like my stomach had been scrubbed out with steel wool and my lower back whacked with a lead pipe. But my stomach quivered and my colon trembled, so I started crawling across the bedroom floor to the bathroom.

“Christie, where are you––?” The Boyfriend™ calls after me. “Wait, I’ll carry you.”

“No, no,” I moan. “Go to sleep. Don’t want to wake you.”

“Oh, my God!”

I think this is where he wanted to pick up the giant metal Calphalon pasta pot he’d put beside the bed and bash my head in with it. But he didn’t because The Boyfriend™ possesses tremendous patience. He waits outside the bathroom while I shiver, throw up bile into his upstairs trashcan and unload murky swamp water into the toilet, then faint and fall off the toilet.

Repeat this scene like three or four times and randomly add in me crying, “Mommy, I want my mommy before I die of swine flu,” and you know pretty much the rest of the story. He also moved a pillow and blankets into the bathroom, then lay down on the floor and slept next to me. For the next year, The Boyfriend™ can pull this out at any time and use this as a bargaining chip. He wants to play poker with the boys when I want to go shopping for Victorian antiques and lacey curtains? Go, with my sincerest blessing, and here’s a case of premium beer I bought just for y’all. Sainthood has been achieved. Saint The Boyfriend™.

I wake up Monday morning hardly able to stand. After trying to walk down the stairs, then scooch down one stair at a time on my aching ass, I let The Boyfriend™ help me. Then I actually ask him to go to the store and get me Saltines, Vitamin Water and, yes, Pepto-Bismol, which I salivated for the entire time he was away. And I hope you don’t believe for one moment that I wasn’t considering driving myself to the store, because I was. The only thing that stopped me was, well, I couldn’t actually walk, so I reasoned that I couldn’t actually work the pedals to my car. Or even get down the stairs outside The Boyfriend™’s condo.

So here’s the funny thing: helping myself to Pepto-Bismol made things worse for me as a kid, and resisting help for myself made things worse for me as an adult, leading me back to needing Pepto-Bismol (which I’ve resisted pulling from the fridge because my stomach––four days later––finally stopped aching). I learned once that I should only take things when I actually need them, and now I learned (sort of) to take help when I actually need it.

Fuck you, Pepto-Bismol. You aren’t supposed to be a life lesson; you’re supposed to be a guilty pleasure.