My emetophobia started about the same time as everyone else\'s. I was about 7. I came down with emetophobia suddenly, in the middle of the night, when it was the last thing I was expecting. I had never heard of emetophobia, or imagined there could be such a thing as the fear of vomiting, but I\'ve thought about it every day since. That\'s a lot of days.

In the weeks after my episode, I looked up vomiting in the encyclopedia. I learned a few things about it that I never knew before, but what was weird was that whenever I would visit an encyclopedia or a family medical book or some other book that had information about throwing up, I would get this ... feeling. I couldn\'t exactly pinpoint the feeling, but I had this sensation in my private parts that I was suddenly conscious of. But I didn\'t know what it meant. It was just kind of a feeling of excitement whenever I read or heard about throwing up. I only threw up once after I became an emet, when I was 10.

The first time I thought there might be more than ordinary excitement to the feeling was when I was in the 8th grade and got sent to a study hall to take a test. As I sat there working on my parts of speech, a boy in the study hall, who I will never forget, was telling about something that happened to him earlier that week. \"I had a big breakfast the other day, and then I got sick,\" he said. I got that same feeling I had reading the encyclopedia, only this was different. More intense. I was 13 now. I had boobs. All of a sudden I felt this sudden state of arousal and something I had never felt before was happening in my privates. \"I was just about to go out and catch the bus, when I realized I had to go to the bathroom and throw up,\" the boy continued. I tried not to look at him as I pictured him in my mind running to the bathroom and bending over the commode. Did he make it in time? Did he splatter the hallway on the way there? Was his hand clenched over his mouth? I would never know. \"Quiet!,\" bellowed the study hall monitor. \"There\'s a girl here taking a test!\" I piped in, not particularly eagerly, \"Oh, it doesn\'t bother me.\" The nasty lady glared. \"It bothers ME!\" I finished the test but wondered what the boy and the others were passing notes about. Were they sharing details of the dreaded spew?

I couldn\'t understand it. Throwing up was the one thing I feared most, that I obsessed about daily. Every bite I ate from age 7 on, I wondered if it might come back again and prayed that it didn\'t. Yet here listening to this strange boy tell the study hall how he had thrown up had gotten me turned on like never before.

I had learned what masturbating was from Janey, one of my close friends, who always seemed to know about sexual things before anyone else. Janey told me she liked to imagine that she and John Travolta were doing it. One night I decided to masturbate. I tried to picture Tom Cruise (I\'m not a Travolta girl) but my thoughts kept drifting to that random guy from study hall. It had been over a year, at least. I kept thinking what he\'d said, and pictured him throwing up, over and over. \"I had a big breakfast the other day, and then I got sick ... I got sick ... I got sick ... I had to go to the bathroom and throw up ... and throw up ... and throw up.\" I made up the dialogue he would have said. \"Ohh... I feel sick. Ohh... I\'m gonna puke...I\'m not goin\' to school today \'cause I just threw up ... I just threw up ... I just threw up...\" That\'s how I had my first orgasm.

From that point on, most of my sex fantasies were like that. They involved various guys from school, or celebrities, and even my high school boyfriends, all being overcome by their stomachs. One of my favorites was that the guy was being made to throw up by the doctor for some test or something. I was often there holding the little bowl for him. Needless to say, I have felt very guilty and ashamed about these fantasies. I am still emetophobic. S