Monday, April 14, 2008

Why are hospital emesis basins so small?

emesis
noun
the reflex act of ejecting the contents of the stomach through the mouth [syn: vomit, upchuck, barf, ralph, spew, hurl, heave, puke, blow chunks, call Ralph on the big white phone, air out your gastric contents, barf up a lung, be a food fountain, burp for the hearing impaired, decorate the porcelain, make an alimentary u-turn]

Abbie has been sick the past couple of days. If you could not guess, she was throwing up. For some strange reason, I have been thinking about emesis lately. I can not remember seeing Abbie vomit like she did on Saturday. It was like her mouth was the end of the faucet and the valve was all the way open. I started thinking, that takes some violence to get the fluids flying up like that. When the body does not want something in the stomach, it has a stout mechanism to get rid of it. Seinfeld had an episode where Jerry talked about his vomit streak. He had not puked in 13 years. The streak came to an end near the end of the episode. I am sure Mom has been shaking her head and muttering, "Where did I go wrong?" while she reads this. Sorry Mom, but seeing Abbie spew gave me a new perspective on reverse peristalsis. I felt it was a relevant and worthwhile topic to chew on (pardon the pun). If anyone is interested, I found a website with a huge number of vomit synonyms (you know, for parties and such): http://www.geocities.com/mbordt/chunder2.htm .

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Not sure what to say other than that I agree that hospital emesis basins are way too small. I know from experience. Hard to avoid being the backsplash during one of those violent episodes. . .does not make for a fun shift as a nurse's aide.
Sorry Abbie has been sick; however, it's good to know that you can help out in a situation like that. . .you never know, Job, you may have to take care of your old sister like that someday!