My First Puke

My Family Law clinic partner, Joleen, and I travel around Syracuse fighting crime. Not really, but we do spend an awful lot of time together talking about people's problems and how to fix them. So yesterday, we were driving around Northern Syracuse near the airport, completely lost and late for a meeting at a client's house. We pulled into a strip mall to reread our directions and call the client for information. And I don't know if it was the heat (mid-70s and humid) or my long-sleeved shirt or the fact that I had just drank a blueberrry smoothie and it was reacting with some antibiotics I am currently choking down, but I had to puke.

So I said to Joleen, "This is really gross, but I have to go inside that bakery and throw-up now," and I jumped out of her car, raced in, and finally, for the first time in 13 weeks, threw up. Yech. I hate throwing up, and so far I've been able to prevent throwing up in a kind of mind-over-matter fight with myself - one morning I really had to, but the thought of throwing up the blueberry pancakes that I had begged Dave to make went against my constitution, so I just decided, as I sat there next to the toilet, Purna beside me on the bathroom floor watching intently, that I didn't want to throw up. So I didn't. And that's how it's gone for the past 13 weeks. Until yesterday.

I was a little embarrassed about throwing up in the bakery restroom, and that Joleen knew what I was doing, and the counter people could hear my retching. And I felt like I should probably buy something now after misusing their facilities. So I opened the door, prepared to order a Pepsi to settle my stomach, and there was Joleen at the counter, ordering an egg sandwich, as though pregnant women jumping from her car and puking in bakery bathrooms was a perfectly normal occurrence. So we sat inside for a couple minutes, I felt better, and we got back on the road. And when we arrived at the client's home, I felt so thankful that I had gotten all the grossness out of me, because really, the last thing I wanted to do was puke in this client's house.