Nausea Ad Nauseam

The wind has been rather strong since I arrived on the rig yesterday, and the pitch and roll have been feeling it most acutely. Do you know what else has been feeling it acutely? My stomach.

I am for perhaps the first time in my life, seasick.

I never thought, as a child skipping over wave after wave on the open-air Whaler motorboat across Duxbury Bay, that I could ever get seasick. The sea was the most refreshing thing possible, and the waves we slammed into, careened over, and tossed merrily through could never cause me more distress than a sharp bump to my tuckus on a particularly bouncy crest.

But here, I sit in my 12' x 8' steel box, with the only window -- which looks out into the black night sea that I know is there but cannot discern -- at my back, I am experiencing the kind of disconcerting motions I never felt with the spray on my face and the seaweed streaming through my dangling fingers. The rocking here is gentle but on unpredictable axes. The swaying of the rig takes me unexpectedly and causes minor bouts of vertigo while I'm climbing stairs. One time during my last hitch after I had just finished a workout in the gym, the rocking caused such a mirror of dizziness in me that I was afraid I had pushed myself too hard and I was going to faint.

I should perhaps state that I am nowhere near the full-blown "heaving my breakfast over the railing" level of seasickness. Rather I am at the undulating nausea that hits my gut and my head in unpredictable waves (haha, waves). The facts that I have drunk 3 cups of green tea today and took a huge multivitamin on a not-quite-full stomach have probably not helped. In such situations, caffeine is not my friend. From a vast deal of experience in minor nausea from car trips, I find that water and sodium are my best remedies, and I recently downed a big cup of iced H20 and ate a bologna sandwich.

I'm feeling better already, but the swaying has redoubled in the past minute. Would turning away from the computer monitor help? Probably, but that doesn't mean I'll do it.