Last Updated on July 10, 2019 by PowersToTravel
In my twenties, after having traveled quite a bit with my parents as a child and teenager, I swore off travel. Why would I want to travel?
Why indeed?
- It can be expensive, especially the way we travel, in that we aren’t backpackers.
- Balancing my blood glucose levels is so much harder when you introduce all the variables of travel: different foods, different levels of exercise, lack of accessibility of needed food or medications.
- I get car-sick at the drop of a pin. Actually I get very nauseous; I generally don’t throw up, but it can ruin an entire day.
Life is motion
It’s not just cars – it’s planes and boats as well that upset me. My “adventures” in life were always marked by how sick I got. I went to Provincetown to go on a whale watch as a college student. Oh my goodness, what a terrible day in the van driving hours to get to P-town, and then the waves?
I flew home from France and vomited into the little bag just as the plane touched down. No one to give it to, nothing to do but leave it in seat since all the stewardesses were now at the front of the plane.
I could go on and on.
I tried Dramamine after the P-town incident and found that really ruined my travel day – it would entirely knock me out, so badly that I was concerned about my ability to monitor my blood sugars. I had had to resort to Dramamine while crossing from Antarctica back to Ushuaia in 2007 during a bad sea. I had staggered and wandered the boat, falling asleep where-ever I landed.
So why travel now?
I learned about SeaBands, the magical elastic bracelets that put pressure on important points in your wrist. I began to be able to take a ferry, fly in a plane. I also took control of life myself – I refused to sit in a back seat in a car. I always chose a seat over the wings on the plane.
For a good twenty years I’ve depended on my SeaBands to get me through the tough spots in travel.
What happened last year?
But recently, in Laos in 2017, and then Romania, in 2018, I found I could no longer cope with being a passenger in the back seat. In Laos the guide even gave me the front seat and I still could not cope with the swaying of the vehicle as we accelerated through the many, many curves. It was such a bad experience that I almost discharged the guide to take a plane onward to our next city.
I have pretty much determined that the cause of my severe problem was that my SeaBands had gotten old – the elastic stretched and the plastic nubbins which were supposed to exert pressure, stopped.
I’ve bought new SeaBands, but I won’t have much of an opportunity to try them out, to really know for sure if they will work for me in extreme conditions.
Our next trip is a driving trip to Quebec, and Greg will be driving, and I’ll be passenger. But I’ll be in the front seat, and the roads will be highways.
Next, we fly so many hours over to Queensland, Australia, and we will be seated above the wings. We’ll rent a car there too, and I’ll be in the front seat. Then we go to Japan, and we’ll be in trains for the most part. Trains don’t generally bother me.
Dreaming of Bhutan and a better way
However, I’m considering Bhutan for the following year. I’ve read in other blogs that if you are prone to motion sickness you just have to do something for that driving trip.
I plan to get a prescription for the Transderm-Scop patch. My doctor prescribed this for me in 2013 when we headed off on an eight-day small boat trip in the Galapagos. Three days on with one patch, then remove it, and put a different one behind the other ear; repeat as necessary.
We found in the Galapagos that the weather was calm. Oh, it was a lovely time on the water until the second to the last day. We were located on the west side of Isabela and were headed north around the top of Isabela over to Santa Cruz Island, on a nighttime crossing. The pilot warned us – this will be rough!
I put on the patch that evening. Was it ever rough! Our cabin was located at the prow of the boat, just above the water line. Our king-sized built-in bed actually came loose from the wall and bounced up and down all night as we crashed into each wave. As afraid I was of the turbulence, I did not get sick! I believe I left the patch on for another day or so, and then removed it when the seas calmed.
After our return, we heard from one of the other families on that trip. Their teenage daughter had originally started with the patch several days before the Galapagos cruise, being in the Andes at the time. Then she continued with it for the eleven days of the trip, finally stopping upon her return to the US. That calculates to about 15 days or so, perhaps more.
Upon her return, after taking off the patch, she suddenly had heart palpitations, dizziness and who knows what-all. She was taken to the emergency room where they diagnosed her as suffering from withdrawal from the patch. She eventually felt better.
I don’t want the same thing to happen to me, especially mid-vacation in a foreign country. For that reason I am carefully planning the itinerary to put the bad travel days together, so that I only use one or two patches, maximum.
What’s your solution?
I’ve tried Dramamine, SeaBands and Transderm-Scop. What has worked for you?
