Hi,

My name is Jane and I have suffered from emetophobia for over 47 years. At first, I can honestly say that I thought absolutely everyone felt the same as I did: vomit was beyond disgusting and frightening, surely? However, as time went on and I found myself severely poorly and misunderstood my everyone, that I began to realise that it wasn’t so universal as I thought.

For me, the start of it all, I am pretty sure, occurred when I had surgery when I was 4 years old. It was 1976 and my parents didn’t stay with me, as was mainly the case then, but I was absolutely terrified. A young boy in the bed opposite was sick and I can remember it vividly. Much research dissects the percentages of what emetophobes are particularly scared about, and I would say that I am particularly distressed about hearing and seeing others be sick so that would perhaps fit with my experience in the hospital.

If I stay with friends, or they with me, I am liable to be rigid with fear if they go to the toilet in the night and inadvertently cough. As we all know with our own human experience with regard to fear and phobias, a thunderstorm could be raging outside, a huge spider could be crawling all over me (neither of which would bother me) but an innocent cough renders me terrified.

Would I have then become emetophobic without the hospital experience? I don’t know, obviously. Would I have been as susceptible if I had seen someone sick at primary school? As they are (I am a secondary school teacher…) but all I can say is that I began, slowly, over the next three years, to be aware of sickness and anyone with a bug. Edmund eats too many Turkish Delights in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and is sick. That upset me. Bugs at school made me want to stay at home. I began to become distressed when my brother was sick as a toddler. But you don’t suddenly wake up at 6 years old and label yourself with emetophobia – who had even really heard of phobias in 1978!! Then at 7 I caught a sickness bug. It was horrible but I didn’t especially become traumatised directly after it. Two years later, at the age of 9, I ate too much cake at my grandparents and felt sick on the way home in the car. (I was interested to read Tuppence Middleton in Scorpions (well worth a read if not read already) about her car journey that instigated/ exacerbated her feelings of sickness) and I am grateful to Tuppence Middleton for writing about her experiences). After that, I became a full blown emetophobe -super anxious around anyone who looked pale, hyper vigilant about any mention of bugs, questioning friends at school ‘ if they had been sick recently’ and removing myself from them if they had. It was NEVER off my mind. But the main way I reacted to it was to ‘ never eat more than the day before’ – as a response to feeling so incredibly full after what was essentially too much cake. So, every night before I went to sleep, I had to tick off exactly what I had eaten and if that corresponded to the day before in terms of amount – very systematically OCD, certainly. I genuinely thought, at this point, that I would be horrifically sick, if I ate even slightly more than the day before. I ended up in hospital.

In the end, I was an outpatient at Birmingham Children’s Hospital between the years 1982-3. Every Wednesday I met with my doctor who I think was instrumental to helping me get better: she was very kind and very, very patient. Whilst not actually understanding sick phobias (at all) she did at least understand that I was an anxious worrier. She helped my Mum who came with me to appointments. Obviously. I gradually was able to do what had terrified me -eat more than the day before – but it was very systematic and careful. You couldn’t just wolf food down. It helped that I loved school and that my Grandad was so incredibly wonderfully kind. But get better I did and I have no problems whatsoever with food now. I don’t overeat and I hate feeling full but that’s about it. I don’t drink alcohol and that is partly to do with the emetophobia but it’s no loss as I don’t like it much anyway. I would say that I was completely better from the food terror by 14.

It seems to me absolutely correct that exposure therapy is very different for emetophobes in terms of treatment as vomit is fairly repulsive to expose anyone to. I have always said this to friends: it’s not like having a phobia of baked beans or buttons – fairly benign in the first instance. Around the house as a matter of course.

I have often wondered whether emetophobia is a result of people long long ago eating poisonous mushrooms and berries and then having their life threatened with poisoning and the resulting panic and fear with being sick after eating said poisons. That panic and fear would then have ricocheted around the whole tribe/ cave / extended families and passed down through generations.

Over the years, I have probably encountered about four people who have emetophobia – one at work via just washing hands at the sink. It is misunderstood, as we know, because the difference between disliking, intensely disliking and being phobic is different.

I am much better and who honestly say that it does not now have a big impact on my day-to-day life. Just getting older seems to mitigate a bit. Is that perhaps you become a little more desensitised? Or that life experiences expose you more experiences that you eventually manage to live through? I managed to live through an entire lesson with a student with the cardboard sick bowl in front of them and it no bother me.  I don’t like being around people who have been sick but neither would I run screaming for the hills, either. Unless it was very obviously a serious bug….

My very most traumatic experience was when norovirus hit the ward when my Dad had a week to live with bowel cancer but there was no question that I had to be there with him. That tested me but I can honestly say that, for very obvious reasons, I didn’t really think about the norovirus once I had left the ward.

So, I am extremely grateful, happy and relieved that we now know much more about emetophobia, that we have professionals willing to spend time and energy researching and helping others and that we now have Emet Action to gather people together who need help, support or just extra information, the information that would have perhaps been helpful for me in the 1980s.