This morning, right after he consumed three frozen waffles in the pre-dawn darkness before his usual two-mile bike ride to school, my seven-year old son threw up his breakfast. I recognized the gagging, coughing sound coming from behind the closed bathroom door right away. I rushed in to ensure he was correctly positioned for evacuation over the commode. You see, Travis, has always been a chucker.
He started out as one of those babies that cried until he threw up. You know the ones—after a number of times of having his sheets soiled, he leaned to projectile vomit over the side of the crib during his tiny tyrant rages of separation anxiety so that he would not be inconvenienced by a bedding change. The once-white carpet of his bedroom has certainly seen better days. If he was an adolescent girl with a weight problem and a subscription to Vogue, I would be concerned. As it stands now, it is not anger that triggers the gastrointestinal spasm—it is smell. He complains that he smelled something bad and it made him throw up, and I am inclined to believe him.
I, too, am a nose breather by nature. That is, I believe there are some of us who have a heightened sense of smell (and hearing too; I have very acute hearing—or I used to before I had to shout over the squabbling sounds of four children to make myself be heard) and are sensitive to smells that other normal humans may never be inclined to acknowledge. It may be that my sense of smell and hearing have compensated for my worse-than average eyesight that dogged me for much of my life. Until I discovered the miracle of LASIK in 2000, I was literally blind as a bat but imbued with a tremendous ability to sniff out any kind of fair and foul odor that came within a football field’s distance of me. Clearly, Travis has inherited this genetic quality.
My husband, unfortunately, cannot relate to the hyper-sensitive olfactory awareness that my son and I share. When we were deciding whether or not to have our youngest child’s adenoids removed to address her noisy and unsightly mouth-breathing, Tom took some offense. Tom is a (gasp) nighttime mouth breather and sees nothing wrong with getting a little help from the mouth to get oxygen through the nose. I, on the other hand, see this as an abomination of nature—if God saw fit to give us a nose from which to smell and breathe, there is no reason to bring the mouth into it.
