Most people don’t know the real reason why opening a children’s bookstore has been a godsend for me. There are plenty of reasons why no one knows, the largest of which is because I didn’t want anyone to know, and so I didn’t tell them. I’m not even sure why it feels like time to share it now, but it may be because I know, somewhere deep down, that people will find out about it soon enough.
Last September I got sick. I didn’t think much of it because I’ve never been a pillar of health. But as I sat at my desk at work that day editing some book or other, I had the sudden need to vomit. Not just that; I couldn’t stop. I figured I’d go home since it was probably a stomach bug or maybe even the flu. Other than the fact that I was throwing up, I felt completely fine.
(I will interject here that there is no way that I was or have been pregnant, so that isn’t even a consideration. I’m single as single can be. And yes, that is the first thing people assume.)
Days and weeks passed, and I continued to throw up, often very violently and several times a day. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. They tested for everything under the sun. I even went through a cycle of antibiotics because we thought it could be giardia (waterskiing, never again). After about three weeks of constant, daily puking, I started to feel better. But then a few days later I was back to vomiting and it didn’t let up for two more months.
If you’ve never thrown up or at least not much, I don’t know if you can imagine how horrible it is. Day in, night out there was nausea so severe I couldn’t even sleep, let alone eat or read or work—even after taking anti-nausea medication. I drank water or Gatorade whenever I could, just to stay hydrated, but that didn’t stop the vomiting. Often, I wouldn’t have anything in my stomach other than water, and so that was all that would come up. When the water was gone, it would be dry heaves. Days and weeks and months of vomiting.
We ruled out everything imaginable in every way possible: blood tests, stool tests, colonoscopy, endoscopy. I was poked and prodded and pinched till I was ready to scream for the lack of answers.
Then it stopped. It may have tapered a bit toward the end, but it was almost as sudden an ending as had been the beginning. We didn’t have an answer for the past three months, but I felt fine, so I wasn’t going to complain. I went back to work after being on-again-off-again on medical leave.
Two months went by. Then the vomiting started again. I knew how it felt then, and how horrible it was to be hunched over a bowl or bucket or toilet for hours a day. And I feared it would be just as awful as the first time. So I started back to the doctor’s office, draining my health, my strength, my will, and my bank account.
Then one night, in tears of frustration and anger, I scoured the internet to find something, anything, to explain what was wrong with me. I googled “weird vomiting disease” or some such. That’s when I found it. A condition called Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome. For unknown reasons, some people go through cycles of vomiting. Most frequently it affects children, who are more prone to frequent bouts of short duration (2–3 days, about a dozen or more times a year). For a time doctors didn’t think adults could have it, but now they’re realizing that some adults have episodes of longer duration but less frequently than children. Of, say, up to three weeks, three or four times a year. No one knows why. There is no cure. There isn’t even a common therapy or medication or treatment. Some doctors don’t even know it exists.
The more I read, the more I realized—this was it. That’s what was happening to me. I went to my doctor and we discussed what I’d found. He thought it possible, so we tried a drug that treats migraines to see if that would help. (Cyclic Vomiting is actually related to migraines in that you can also get abdominal migraines, which cause vomiting and stomach pain, in addition to the headache migraines.) Slowly, it did, and it has for the past four months. Every month I still deal with bouts of pretty severe nausea, but I haven’t thrown up in about three months.
This is how it relates to the store, and how the store has become my savior: At the beginning of the second phase of vomiting back in January, right as I was preparing to go on sick leave for a second time in less than six months, I had my epiphany or whatever you want to call it about the bookstore.
In the weeks I was out on sick leave, I sat on the couch, TV on in the background, and put together a business plan and an auction for the fledgling Fire Petal Books. Working on the computer was really the only thing I could do, since severe fatigue accompanied the vomiting spells, making it hard to concentrate on reading or editing. So in between bouts of running for the bathroom, I would sit there on the couch, computer on my lap, emailing, creating auction listings, and doing whatever I could to make the store more than a mirage.
Fire Petal Books is nearly a reality, but as I get so close to realizing this dream, my body is trying to slow me down. I’ve been working so hard and for so long these past six months, I’m wearing down a bit. (It would probably be accurate to say that my every waking thought involves the store, in addition to the frequent dreams I have about it). When my body wears down, so does the defense I’ve raised against the vomiting. It doesn’t help, either, that I was so busy with the store, I forgot to refill my medication until after I’d run out. Let’s just say the past few days have been anything but pleasant.
So maybe that’s why I needed to write this long-winded post: to share my fear that it’ll start again, that I’ll spend too much time over the next few weeks hunched over a toilet or resting on what I fondly refer to as my “napping couch” in the back room of the store.
But even then, even if I do get sick and have to rest for an hour in between working, I can do that. I am my own boss and can set the schedule. If I’m not able to work physically, I can plop myself down on the couch and answer emails for a while or work on the newsletter. I can also have incredible employees who know that if I have to, I’ll sleep for an hour, then get back to work once I’ve rested a bit. They’ll take care of things when I can’t, and I love them for it.
So Fire Petal has saved me, both in the sense that I do what I can when I can without fear of losing my job, and that my passion for children’s books keeps me going when it would be so easy to lie in bed and bemoan my wretched health.
Now please, don’t think you need to feel sorry for me. We all have difficulties in life, and this is mine. But if nothing else, know that nothing can stop you from reaching your dreams. Not even never-ending vomit.
