I write about dealing with nausea in my workouts quite a bit. It’s usually about a week or two every month so I have a lot of workouts where I am nauseous. Last week was one of those weeks. And I think that I really do well when it comes to not letting that set me back too much. I do have to make several modifications to my workouts when I feel that way, but I still go. And it’s a point of pride with me that I still make it to my workouts no matter how bad the nausea gets. While I have missed class before when I’m sick, it’s never because of nausea.
But for some reason, I can’t seem to take that idea and apply it to the rest of my life. When I have my bad nausea days, I want to just hibernate in my house. I rarely will leave the house beyond my workouts and I will go out of my way to not have to leave. If I was planning on going to the grocery store, I will order delivery food so I don’t have to be outside the comfort of my own home. I will go do things if I have no alternative or if it is time sensitive, but I really do prefer to be home when I feel like that. I don’t always throw up when I’m nauseous, but I’m always terrified that I will and I’d rather be sick at home.
I do miss out on some fun things because I want to stay at home, but it’s only been lately that it’s really upsetting me that I do that. I have missed a few really fun events that I wanted to go to, including 2 different goodbye parties for friends who are moving away from LA. Fortunately, both of those friends still have time before they each leave for the cities that they are moving to, but it still sucked to miss an event that I had been excited to attend. I know that they both understood why I didn’t make it to their parties and for both of their parties they had a lot of other friends there. But that doesn’t make me feel any better about letting my nausea stop me from going.
I don’t know why I have the ability to push through the nausea to go to workouts when I don’t have the same ability to push through to go to something fun. Maybe it’s because I know a workout is only an hour long and going to a party might be longer? Maybe it’s because in a workout I don’t have to do much with other people and at a party or event I need to be social and have fun? I’m not exactly sure what the reasons could be but I know that it’s something. And I really want to figure out how to get beyond this.
I’ve been lucky that I haven’t had to miss a lot of events due to the nausea, but I know that this isn’t necessarily going to get better. I have several more years of these weeks of nausea each month ahead of me and I don’t want to have to plan my life around those weeks. I need to work on some skills that I can use to help myself not feel as awful or to hide how I do feel. I have my various medications and homeopathic options to try to make myself feel better, but I guess it’s time to explore more options beyond what I have. And I also know that being as open about this struggle as I have been has helpful as my friends don’t seem too upset if I’m at a party and not feeling my best. They understand why I might not be chatty and they don’t bug me about why I’m not acting like my normal self.
And maybe I can use the fact that I can go to my workouts while nauseous as inspiration for how I can be out and doing fun things while nauseous. I should pay more attention to my body and what I use to make it through my workouts and use that for the rest of my life. I don’t know why I haven’t done that yet, but maybe I needed something to be the inspiration for wanting to work on this even more than I have. I still have the small hope that there will be something that will end up working for me every month to either not feel nauseous or to make it tolerable. But I also have to be realistic and plan for that to not happen. So I have to figure out my own solution to work through this to stop letting it affect my life as much as it does.
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