Accord­ing to wikipedia, it’s prob­a­ble that two in three of you are just like me. I’m not sure that pleases many of you. I’m talk­ing about those who are sus­cep­ti­ble to kine­to­sis. Oth­er­wise known as motion sickness.

This wiki arti­cle claims that 66% of peo­ple are sus­cep­ti­ble to motion sick­ness in severe con­di­tions. Only 33% are sus­cep­ti­ble in mild con­di­tions. I’m not entirely sure which cat­e­gory I fit into, but I’d say it’s likely to be the first. I get air sick, sea sick, sim­u­la­tion sick, car and bus sick and I don’t really know about space sick. I’ve never been there but chances are I’d feel ill.

Every Fri­day after­noon I take my two soft­ball teams to play inter­school sport. This involves a ten minute bus ride each way. Usu­ally I try and sit by myself so I can look out of the bus but today one of my shy, newish boys asked if I could sit with him. Not want­ing to be rude, I accepted his offer and he pro­ceeded to talk the entire way, pre­vent­ing me from watch­ing out the front of the bus con­tin­u­ously. I began to feel excep­tion­ally ill and, since ask­ing him to stop talk­ing would only be a lit­tle less offen­sive than throw­ing up on him, I let him con­tinue. It’s very dif­fi­cult to seem inter­ested and engaged in a con­ver­sa­tion with a small child whilst want­ing to throw up. Once we got back to school the nau­sea did not sub­side. Again, it’s almost impos­si­ble to teach 29 hyper­ac­tive chil­dren while want­ing to throw up. Fur­ther­more I have the unfor­tu­nate ten­dency to not ask for help when needed so I sol­diered* on.

I’m sick of get­ting motion sick­ness. Are there any reme­dies out there that actu­ally work? I tried sea sick­ness tablets once but I was so drowsy that I slept through the entire cruise. When I awoke, I was too drowsy to talk with­out sound­ing drunk. The tablets would have made me unfit to drive had I been required to do so.

My only other rem­edy so far has been to go to sleep. There’s a catch with this one but I’m afraid telling you would be over­shar­ing. And we know how Nathan feels about that. Unfor­tu­nately this rem­edy doesn’t really work if you’re sup­pose to be the one in charge.

*I actu­ally told my kids I had some “very impor­tant” work to do on the com­puter and would let them play some quite games so long as they didn’t dis­turb me. Tech­ni­cally super­vi­sion rather than teach­ing but that’s all I could manage.

Author: Robyn Campbell

Robyn is Nathan's wife. She was once a teacher. She is now a student at Queensland Theological College. She enjoys playing music and all sorts of exercise. She is the proud owner of two pet turtles.

Read Robyn's 22 articles.