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Vice Blog

THE TYRANT IS DYING

Right now I feel fine. Nothing unusual has happened to me or to what's around me. I've had no intake of any kind. Tomorrow morning (in like 8 hours) I am going in for an upper GI endoscopy because I get nauseous sometimes and start vomiting and I cannot stop. It happened four times over Christmas break and a handful of other times throughout the past year. I know what you're thinking: Why don't you not go out so much and be healthy? Yeah, good answer. But I told the doctor when we first met, "Hey, look. I drink, I smoke, I smoke weed, etc.." I told her everything. And this is how I know I like her: She said, "Lots of people do all of that and more

all of the time

and they don't have this problem." A pleasant change of pace, right? I'm so sick of doctors relating anything wrong to you with how you choose to illegally pass your time. What I get is a debilitating head-to-toe nausea. It is miserable. It is a beyond-Sartrean crisis and I'd hesitate to wish it upon my worst enemy (even though I have none). I've already had a sonogram and x-rays in which they found a cyst--or water bubble as my kind doctor put it--on one of my kidneys, but she said that it's probably been there since birth so that's my parents' fault, not mine. It's kind of nice, this water bubble, isn't it? Instead of it worrying me, I have been enjoying its being discovered. I feel like it is my new center, my core, or maybe the embryo of my inner-homunculus. I will thank and blame this water bubble for everything that happens to me from now on. So I get this nausea and can't stop vomiting and all I want to do, what I must do and can't stop doing, is take hot bath after hot bath. And then vomit in between. During a ten-hour period, I'll take 20 baths. It's like I'm insane. And twenty baths in a ten-hour period is a conservative estimate. It's probably more like 30. It's the same bath water that I just keep heating up each time. There is no time for a drain and a refill. Sometimes I am in there so soon after the prior bath that I don't even need to heat it up. I can't stop getting in these hot baths. I can't stop spinning and puking so I get in the hot bathwater and it makes me feel less terrible for the moment. I don't know--it just feels wombish and I think the hot water is maybe healing me. Or maybe I'm doing that whole return to the ocean thing via my Manhattan bathtub. I have thought, during these bouts of vomiting and bathing, that if I could fit down the drain and ride a hot gush of water to my death in the sewers, I would do so in a minute. Also, there's pot. Oh my god, pot has been saving my fucking life. I can do one-hitter and this monster nausea is taken immediately down by ten notches, easy. But it's not killed completely, and only for a little bit. This is serious nausea. I've never felt anything like it in my life. Head-to-toe, room-spinning, kill-yourself nausea. It's so bad I actually want to vomit because it's a brief second of relief. I will chug like a quart of water just to be able to vomit and feel that second of relief after evacuating my stomach for the 100th time. When I'm vomiting, between heaves I'll whisper, "Oh yeah, baby, come on," into the bucket like people who talk during sex. I'm wondering what they'll put me under with tomorrow. My plan is to come out of the sedation and finish this blog post while "medicated" or whatever to see how I write under sweet medical sedation. See you then! GIANCARLO DITRAPANO