Every Home Should Have One of These

Somebody put a vise on my head during the night, and at 4:00 in the AM I woke up with a killer migraine headache.

What to do?  Head down to the kitchen and dig out THE BOWL.  Doesn't every household have one of these?

There's a lot of history associated with this bowl of ours.  I don't even know really where it came from, but I do know I never purchased it anywhere.  I think it may have been found in the cellar of this home way back when we purchased it in 1981.

Regardless of all the names it's been called over the years, we all know its purpose.

The bowl

The puke bowl

The spit up bowl

The barf bowl

The throw up bowl

That bowl

The vomitorium

The barfarama

I'm almost sentimentally attached to it.  It'll never be one of those items eliminated in my decluttering adventures.

 It has seen its way through many illnesses of our four children down through the years.  And, it has been the collection receptacle for the debris following the many massive nighttime nosebleeds that my kids were plagued with.  In more recent years, my migraines have kept it in regular use.

As par for the course with my very bad migraines, that bowl and the other porcelain bowl got several rounds of use this morning, and then I took my migraine medicine and went back to bed.

My migraine prescription allows me to take up to a maximum of five pills over the course of several hours.  Today was a 3* migraine, meaning I started getting relief after 3 pills.  With a 5* migraine, I start thinking about a trip to the emergency room.

Typically I need to be in a completely dark, completely quiet environment.  Eyes closed and a pillow over my head.

In the throes of the worst of one of these migraines, I sometimes imagine Jesus kneeling by my bedside, comforting me and stroking my hair off my face.  When the pain feels like I cannot bear it for one more minute, I consider bargaining with him, offering him my firstborn if he will just take away this headache.  Then I always hear him kindly and gently say to me, "You've already given me your heart.  What more could I want from you?"

So I use THE BOWL again, and eventually drift off into a deep, drug-induced sleep.  The rest of my day will be wrecked, as the after effects of the medicine wear off.

Why do I get these headaches?  I don't know.  Concerning this latest one, I could guess I ate a perfect mix of foods yesterday that are migraine triggers - cheese, too many onions on my hoagie, and a bowl of chocolate ice cream.  A virtual migraine casserole.

Now back to THE BOWL.

I've learned one sure thing over the years:  serve popcorn in THE BOWL on family movie night and you'll have it all to yourself.