After the Vomiting

I vomited out of a moving funicular!

The conductor then gave me a barf bag—too little, too late, sister—and ushered me first out of the car—very embarrassing—and that should have been the end of it. The feeling of fainting usually comes with nausea, but instead of throwing up I usually faint and then I feel fine. So this time I vomited and then I thought I should have felt fine. Oh, was I in for a surprise.

We got back to the hotel and the nausea returned. JL did not go to dinner with the rest of the group but stayed in with me and ordered room service. We watched Notes on a Scandal, an uncomfortable movie to begin with, but this time punctuated with violent attacks of vomiting.

And this is when I put to rest the theory that I’m pregnant. I’m not pregnant people. Don’t think you’re the first one to come up with that idea.

This is how you know you’re staying in a good hotel: they send up prescription drugs! PJ told the front desk I was ill and inquired about medical services. When they heard the problem, the nurse on duty sent up, via some random guy in a suit, a few pills of Emitrex, an anti-nausea which we had never heard of and if you're still thinking "I can't believe she's taking strange pills from strangers" you're not understanding how bad I felt.

Slept like a baby.

The next morning I missed out on the District Six Museum and watched All My Children in bed. I mean, if you’re going to be sick, it might as well be in a nice hotel with soap operas. I checked out the Cavendish Mall nearby, looking for flip-flops for J, but felt like I wanted to sit down the whole time. I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t even last in the bookstore. I went back to bed.
JL called to check in on me after lunch when they were on their way to the bird sanctuary. I had planned on meeting up with them in the afternoon, but still wasn’t feeling up to it. JL called back and said everyone was concerned, so I went to the doctor.

The Colinton Surgery was right across the street from the hotel.



The doctor was extremely nice. I told him the whole saga and after an examination, he told me I had gastritis. He prescribed a better (according to him) anti-nausea than Emitrex and sent me on my way. I’m subscribing the whole thing to food poisoning, which led to an inflamed stomach lining, but the doctor could neither confirm nor deny this with any certainty.

This is why all the pretty pictures suddenly end at Table Mountain. The pills the doctor gave me made me nice and sleepy so I had a nice drugged-up flight home—perhaps the worst Fourth of July ever.

If you head to Cape Town in the near future, don’t eat the beef by the Robben Island Museum.