MY MOTION SICKNESS

           “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.” (Neil Armstrong)

Going on the airwaves and getting through to our small transistor radio at home, those momentous words were uttered, over five decades ago, by the first man on the moon -- Neil Armstrong – transmitting through a live broadcast from more than 238 thousand miles away and being heard and watched by hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

A voracious reader and regular subscriber of Time, Newsweek, and Life magazines, our eldest brother Toto stacked the old copies of the magazines in a run-down stock room in our house. Feasting my eyes on the glossy and colorful photos on the magazines’ covers, I could not help being fired up by the riveting sights of the Apollo astronauts in their fabulous space suits.

The moon landing put the final touches to my fantastic dream -- to become an astronaut myself – which, of course, topped the answers by most, if not all the kids, of my age to that time-honored question: “What do you want to be when you grow up”?

NO CAST-IRON STOMACH

In looking for the best of the best in recruiting top-flight astronauts for a particular space mission, NASA would have flunked me outright as an astronaut candidate. Just for starters, I was not endowed with “the right stuff” – a cast-iron stomach – instead, a motion sickness is what I have.

I would have undergone microgravity training by flying missions virtually in a specially equipped plane – dubbed the “vomit comet” – which flies steeply up and down like a roller coaster. I could only imagine myself blowing up in someone’s face, figuratively speaking, and literally, blowing up vomit (Ugh!) while experiencing about a half minute of weightlessness in going over each hump during such an out-of-this-world training regimen.

I could not be an astronaut due to my stomach alone.

I’m reminded of a long land trip with my aunt to a hinterland in Mindanao during my grade-schooler years. Sitting beside me on a bus, she wore a “hijab,” a Muslim woman’s head covering – a safety cover tip to anyone paying a visit to someone in an area inflicted with ethnic conflicts. Out of the blue, I belched all my lunch out of my stomach (Eww!) over the shoes of another passenger on the bus. It scared the living daylights out of my aunt (she later recounted over the dinner table) when she had taken a closer look at the passenger’s sour face and figured out from what he was wearing -- he was a native of the place. How my aunt and I slipped out from that mess I could no longer recall.

One time, my childhood friends were having some fun at the school yard when I found out for the first time there was something I had that they didn’t have. All of them could seemingly sit on the see-saw or the swing forever, and move up and down or leap like trapeze artists to their hearts’ content. As for me, after sitting in a while on the see-saw, and moving up and down slowly, in less than no time, I would feel so nauseated that I would get off the see-saw right away, find a spot to sit, and then to just watch them play.

YUCK!

My motion sickness is a killjoy. I wrote in my past ATABAY article “My Personal Reflections This Christmas” a sort of a tribute to my mother which I am excerpting below:

“My mother was a dressmaker and she turned me into one of the best-dressed students on a college campus. The 70s fad: Golden Award short sleeve polo shirt, tucked in Levi’s pants, fitted with Hickok belt and buckle, and matched up well with brown cowboy leather boots. Golden Award shirts were limited to large, medium, and small standard sizes. Only when you exactly fit the standard size would you be looking great; otherwise, you’d get a tucking-in hassle every day. Some friends wondered where I had bought my Golden Award shirts. Never would they know my secret: my mother remodeled a stack of my Golden Award shirts in a variety of colors and stripes to fit me perfectly.”

Amid such a dashing-debonair-me backdrop, imagine this lively school excursion scene: I am sitting inside the school bus hitting the long and winding road to several college campuses on a concert tour. Flanked by choral group members with golden voices and pretty faces, all of a sudden, I get cold sweats and pale skin, then I feel dizzy. Feeling nauseated, in the blink of an eye, I throw up. (Yuck!)  It cut dashing debonair me down to size like a child and upset the whole exciting tour for me.

During my corporate heyday when official business travels were a must, I learned some trial and error lessons in managing my motion sickness. For short-distance land trips, for example, I drove my car. That went along with the sound advice: fix one’s gaze at the horizon while inside a moving vehicle. What’s more, the adrenaline rush through my system exacted by my driving overwhelmed my motion sickness fuss. That’s why I’m a fast driver. A long-distance drive though would confound my problem due to fatigue.

I also took Bonamine which induced drowsiness and eventually put me through fragmentary waking and sleeping states, restlessly tossed and turned me on my seat throughout the whole long land trip. I read about some patches applied behind the ear; but, their reported side effects, like blurry vision, have concerned me.

Taking motion sickness as a result of conflicting signals being sent to our brain by our “balancing” inner ear, “seeing” eyes, and “feeling” joints, my son, Leigh Roy, a seaman, eases his seasickness by “being one with the ship” – ranging from his breathing to his moving rhythms.

KILLJOY

            Today, my motion sickness turns into a big-time killjoy to two upcoming twin big events: a high school reunion plus a wedding of my two classmates. The former is special because I was the class valedictorian; the latter is a rarity because both classmates are on the threshold of having lived, up and down, seventy decades of their respective lives.

Sad to say, the comfy less-than-an-hour plane route to the venue my wife and I usually took in the past was scrapped by the airlines. The only option left for us: a 10-hour long land trip which, by default, would get at my motion sickness, let alone, my wife’s hypertension. Even Charles Darwin himself took the motion sickness so seriously that he wrote: “If a person suffer much from seasickness, let him weigh it heavily in the balance. I speak from experience: it is no trifling evil…”

            “Who suffers from motion sickness?” asked Dr. Wilhelmus J. Oosterveld in his article “Motion Sickness.” The good-news answer is simple and comforting to me: everyone. The not-so-good news: I belong to the 5% of the population that suffers heavily. He concluded: “As long as man must travel, he must accept the fact that motion sickness will sometimes be his companion.”

Let me wrap up this article with a la Twilight Zone scene. I conjure up a picture of me riding on a moving bus. In the thick of my drowsiness, I catch sight of a piece of paper on my lap, a sort of a fortune cookie note, with the following message:

“This journey is meaningless without you. Thank you for riding with me through life, you are the best companion.” Love, Motion Sickness

Yikes!

Head still photo courtesy of pixabaydotcom