chicken noodle soup
tw: emetophobia
so every kid has that canon event of a devastating stomach virus, right? one way or another, everyone has it happen at least once, be it food poisoning, norovirus, or simply a piece of a different virus' syndrome. it happens at some point and it is guaranteed to be jarring because these bugs have a funny way of showing up in the middle of the night. midnight, witching hour sometimes. feels like someone cast a hex because something is not right when you sit up immediately from a deep sleep. before you know it, you're making a trail to the bathroom.
i remember one of mine clearly. christmas break. grade school. i have ran through all possibilities as to who or where i got it from. there were far too many variables in the end, and you know, it's just a consequence of the holidays. people bring bugs with them all the time. people underestimate contagious periods of illnesses and bring their kids along who are "on the tail end" of being sick and think it won't matter. people don't wash their hands like they should. tale as old as time. this bug found its way to me through one of these means.
it only affected three family members, two siblings and me. one evening, my little sister became violently ill. she was asleep in my mom's room, the rest of us were in the living room, watching something on tv i don't remember. dad probably picked a movie out, older sister pausing teenage angst for the occasion. we were all gathered. mom tells my younger brother, "go check on your sister." my brother, as he recalled, walked into my mom's room without turning the lights on, light from the living room pouring in just enough to make out the silhouette of my sister sitting up, heaving cries that weren't too unusual to hear from a toddler waking up in the dark. brother said he felt around on the bed for her leg or arm as a means to comfort her. he said he felt something wet on his palm. turns out she painted my mother's blanket irrevocably with a soup of bile, food, and pain, in such a way that i think she honestly just tossed it that same day, because i never saw it after that.
brother was probably grossed out and washed his hands after reporting this to my mom. even if he washed his hands properly, viral particles in vomit have a blanketing (no pun intended) means of guaranteeing the most successful transmission possible. yes, the actual vomitus contains the most dense contagions, but it's what's not seen that is just as dangerous. vomit particles can linger in the air for a bit after freshly expelled, and they can be splashed onto nearby surfaces upon impact. think of the way a dropped bowl of soup looks on the ground. soup and bowl fragments (let's assume it's a fragile bowl) splayed out from point of drop. you might notice bits of soup or shards nearby even after cleanup. point is, even if my brother was careful, he was at high risk. he didn’t stand a chance.
fast forward to that night. christmas didn't happen yet. i remember this because we got a tent gifted and found out early somehow and my brother and i were so excited, we wanted to use it then and there. dad set it up in the living room. we got a bunch of pillows and blankets and set up our beds in there, at the foot of the christmas tree. red and green twinkles intermittently at bedtime; i recall these clearly, looking up at the ceiling of the tent, which was red and blue. red twinkles deepened the reds and blues, green twinkles provides a soft reprieve from red’s intense presence. i couldn’t tell you what time it was, just that it was quiet enough to hear the color changes. floor was hard but i was excited to pretend i was camping in a forest with the starriest sky i could imagine. maybe there’ll be northern lights, too.
then, my brother woke up.
he got up in such a shuffle i didn’t think much of it at first. our heads slept opposite to the tent’s opening. he struggled to open the tent and eventually found his way out. from there, he made a sharp left to my mom’s room. went in, heard my mom raise her voice in an annoyed growl, then i see my brother make a beeline to my right, vomit dribbling out onto the floor. he stops in front of the tent and throws up some more, and this is where i sit up. he gets a moment of respite and continues to the right, where the bathroom is. the bathroom light turns on, mom soon gets up and checks on him. cleans him up a bit presumably, but in such a way that said, “i’ll clean the rest up in the morning, just go to the restroom if it happens again, okay?”
the whole time this happened, i was humming the candy land theme song. cereal boxes sometimes had cds of pc games included, i think. something like that. we had three: a baseball game, chutes and ladders, and candy land. the start screen had a mini character parade with a child’s voice chiming, “candy land, it’s waiting for you, something something lollipops and gumdrops too, what do you say, you should come and play with the candy land gang, the candy land gang!” i’m recalling purely off of memory and i could very much look the actual lyrics up, but that would ruin this stream of storytelling and leave much to be desired.
let’s come back. my heart rate is thumping in my ears, my brother’s wails barely making it through my comfort repetitions, mom grumbling at my brother making a stinky path. he gets quiet, my mom and i think he’s done. he tiredly crawls back in the tent with me. my breathing slows down and i get sleepy again. my head presses against my pillow of choice: spongebob squarepants plushie whose body is large enough to be pillow-sized, soft fleece, a nice cushion to its firmness. the blanket wasn’t as memorable, but it sure kept me warm.
it didn’t feel like i slept at all. i closed my eyes in a way that was more of a blink. that’s when i immediately sat up myself, in an eerily similar choreography as my brother earlier that night. i thought it was anxiety perhaps, feeling nervous from recollecting his bout of sickness. i tried to lay back down, but halfway, i felt my esophagus tingle. as i tried making sense of what that could mean, i felt what resembled swallowing warm soup, only it was rewinding, up and up before i found it hard to breathe, windpipe compressing as i leapt for the front of the tent, barely making it halfway to the bathroom when the soup spilled onto my brother’s premade trail.
out of everything to do with this condition of mine, one that both perplexed and expended me, the most unusual detail of my ailment was that my vomit was nearly identical to campbell’s chicken noodle soup. golden yellow bile, bits of softened food, resembling chicken bits and noodles. up until that point, i hadn’t touched the stuff in a while. the last thing i remembered eating that day were tostadas my mother made: store-bought orange tostada base, refried pinto beans, chopped lettuce and tomatoes, sour cream dollop, freshly shredded mild cheddar cheese. nothing resembling canned soup. i know that sometimes food takes a few days to digest, but i don’t even recall having soup leading up to that fateful night. wouldn’t it make sense to see bits of what i ate earlier in the day? no, i was instead cursed with being a chicken soup faucet.
this routine of darting upwards to the toilet and back to the tent bed made the vomiting less nerve-wracking over time, likely due to the compounding blend of endorphins and dehydration. it had to have been around seven in the morning when i moved further out to the couch in the other room where the tv was, farther from the restroom but the coolness of civil twilight enveloping the sofa felt nice on my skin.
i remember laying down, hair down to my lower back at this age, feeling comfortable for the first time since getting sick upon the floor. i bring up my hair since i lied down and rolled into my hair, not realizing i had chunks of soup in this particular section that pressed against my nose and brought forth the scent of puke i came to become familiar with over the course of several hours. it annoyed me more than it nauseated me. frankly, i was dry heaving at this point in time, astonished that so much liquid can come out of a child’s body. i just wanted to sleep.
soon, day broke. i heard the morning ramblings of my parents in their room, muffled until they stepped out, mom visibly weary at the mess she had to tend to. siblings came out as well, younger sister on the mend. my brother and i were splayed on the sofa, spent from emptying our guts out. older sister got us each a cup of apple juice, mom put on “finding nemo,” and played the bonus content, too--the short toon with the snow globe snowman was a must-play from then on. dory was reciting, “p. sherman, 42 wallaby way, sydney!” as i felt the juice heal me. truly. i think this great value apple juice--this potion of high fructose corn syrup and apple and pear juice concentrates--saved me from withering away into nothingness.
i was perked all the way up by the time the orchestra swelled in the scene where marlin and dory were seemingly trapped in a whale. i felt energized enough to shower by then. i brushed my teeth before with a toothbrush i would use for the last time before swapping it for a new one. i finger combed the caked soup out of my hair under a steamy waterfall, the smell of irish spring and pert rejuvenating my senses. i was in a tranquil forest just like i wanted, a hidden hot spring taking away the last of what terrorized me in the dead of night.
everyone was tidied up and clean and dressed for the day ahead. mom planted pine-sol where there was once a sickly acid path. i was in a blooming spring garden in the middle of december. dad brought the family suburban out front and mom corralled us into the back seats. we went to my aunt’s house in the next town over. this goes back to my earlier observations of parents bringing kids out who aren’t overtly showing symptoms meaning they’re good to go. my mom isn’t an exception, but i don’t hold that against her. i found myself nauseated, perched up against my aunt’s gaudy wood-paneled wall while my older sister, younger brother, and a few cousins struggle to set up “the game of life” board game. nausea, this time, was from an empty stomach. thank god.
aunt and mom took everyone’s order for chinese takeout. that was easy to order, especially for us kids who were just fine with sweet and sour chicken and its paired red 40 dipping sauce, with a side of fries, of course. my brother and i picked away at our food until it registered that it was safe to eat again. we sipped on our canned sprites as one cousin figured out how to set up the spinner so a proper turn order can finally be decided.
my teacher was on maternity leave for much of the fall, and the substitute teacher in place had us write in these 8 x 11 hardcover foiled notebooks as “homework” for the winter break. we were to fill a page a day about what we did for each day we weren’t in school until our return. i was initially excited at first, weaving stories out of the normalcy of being at home instead of a vacation like some of my peers. the written yarns i had soon tapered off when and after i got sick. mom helped me make up a few sentences for the days i missed, and if this teacher had a problem with it, she could take it up with mom. i did what i could.
i remember the first recess back, classmates and i made the rounds of the “what’d you do over break?” inquisition. i responded, flatly, “i got sick.” some were curious about what that meant and timidly prodded, as if i fought a beast and won, and lived to tell the tale, and my testimony would serve as another notch in playground socratic dialogue. i told my story with a heaviness in recollection that evoked wisdom from myself, and drew awe from others.
i couldn’t stand the sight of chicken noodle soup for years. if you had asked me why during this time, i would’ve just told you i had a bad experience once. fast forward to when i got covid for the first time, all i could stomach was chicken noodle soup. this absurdity keeps me going.