I have Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome. All of my mental health problems stem from this disorder (I think). About 5 years ago I started vomiting. We all naturally thought I had a stomach bug. I began a pattern of vomiting about 50 times per hour for an average of 5 days every month. And I mean I can't hold down one drop of water or one morsel of food until the episode is over. It is pure hell to live through. You know when you vomit and you sortof feel better after you yak? Well not the case with this disorder. The nausea is more intense than the worst food poisoning. It does not subside. When there is nothing left to vomit I simply dry heave for hours. I drink gatorade to ease the heaving. It comes back up tasting less awful than bile does. I have to be hospitalized each episode due to getting severely dehydrated and severely hypokalemic. Heart attack low. Scary stuff.

This pattern continued for almost three years before we found the right medication. Imagine being in the hospital for a week every month and they don't know how to help you. The docs gave me every med in the universe. They gave me the strongest antinausea drugs that are given to chemo patients. I threw up in their faces. Nothing worked. We went through so many meds before I got on nortryptyline. I haven't vomited in over a year after taking that med. Thank God.

It is a rare disorder and hard to diagnose since it is a diagnosis of exclusion. There are no test that will be abnormal due to this. I had to go through so many docs that tried to dismiss me as a drug seeker or bulemic. I also had my gallbladder removed when it had nothing wrong. This is a true vomiting disorder. It is not something that I did to myself. This happened b/c there is some sort of disconnect b/t my brain and my gut. We just don't know details.

I have concurrently been diagnosed with autonomic degeneration which means that my nervous system is degenerating and not working properly. Not much we can do about that.

I hope that no one else suffers with this horrible disorder, but if you do, I certainly know what you are going through. The anticipatory anxiety can be one of the worst things about the disorder. You are so scared of when the next episode will start that it begins to consume your life. You have to back up and re order your life so that it will still work when you are vomiting. Not an easy thing to do.

When you have CVS, life is one puke after another.