This was my first time on an actual ship.

Not a ferry.

Not a little sightseeing boat.

A real ship.

The kind where the floor moves whether you want it to or not.

And because I am a responsible traveler, I had come prepared with seasickness medication.

Because I am also me, I had not actually taken it early enough.

Sarah had told me to take it before we got on the ship.

Of course she had.

But I felt fine.

Completely fine.

And nothing inspires poor decision-making quite like feeling completely fine.

The ship was moving. I was eating dinner. Life was good.

Then, halfway through a delicious eggplant dish, something suddenly changed.

I stopped eating.

Looked across the table at Sarah.

And said,

“I need to go lay down. I’m not feeling so good.”

That was the understatement of the century.

Within minutes, I went from peacefully eating eggplant to feeling like someone had unplugged the Earth and plugged it back in sideways.

I was dizzy.

I was nauseous.

The ship was rocking.

My stomach was rocking.

At that point, I’m pretty sure my internal organs were rocking independently of one another.

I somehow made it back to our cabin, which had one of those tiny ship bathrooms that became my home.

My sanctuary.

My prison.

And, for the next several hours, my best friend.

I sat on that bathroom floor absolutely convinced that no human being had ever been as seasick as I currently was.

Not sailors.

Not pirates.

Not anyone in maritime history.

Just me.

Sarah kept checking on me.

And every time she did, I basically gave her the same update:

“I have never felt anything like this in my entire life.”

To which Sarah, with the calm confidence of someone who had both been seasick before and specifically warned me this was going to happen, reminded me:

“I told you to take the medication before we got on the ship. I’ve been seasick before. I know what it’s like.”

Yes.

Yes, she had.

And apparently this was not one of those situations where I was going to get to rewrite history and pretend otherwise.

She had warned me.

I had ignored her.

And now I was living on a bathroom floor.

Case closed.

Unfortunately, I was far too sick to properly appreciate just how right she was.

Hours went by.

At some point, I decided I could not spend the entire night sleeping on a hard bathroom floor.

Surely I could make it the approximately six feet to my little twin bed.

Six feet.

Under normal circumstances, nothing.

That night?

Might as well have been crossing Antarctica on foot.

I waited for what felt like the right moment.

Then I made my move.

I sprinted across the cabin while the ship rocked back and forth, threw myself onto the bed…

…and immediately realized something.

I forgot the trash can.

Critical error.

Possibly the biggest tactical mistake of the evening, aside from, you know, not taking the seasickness medication when Sarah told me to.

Sarah, who had somehow managed to fall asleep during my one-woman maritime disaster, kindly woke up and retrieved it for me.

Thank God she did.

Because that little trash can and I proceeded to spend several more quality hours together.

At one point, I genuinely wondered:

How is there even anything left in me?

Surely I had reached empty.

Apparently my body had located some sort of emergency reserve tank.

Eventually, sometime in the middle of the night, exhaustion finally won and I fell asleep.

The next morning, we started walking toward breakfast.

And by “toward breakfast,” I mean Sarah was going to eat breakfast.

I was simply walking in the same direction.

The idea of putting food anywhere near my body felt reckless.

On the way, we happened to run into the ship’s doctor.

I told him about my night.

The bathroom floor.

The dizziness.

The nausea.

The near-death experience.

He casually responded,

“Oh yeah, I had a lot of people call me last night. I gave them a shot in the ass. It really helps.”

Excuse me?

A what?

There was a shot in the ass option?!

You’re telling me that while I had been lying on a bathroom floor reconsidering every decision I had ever made, other passengers had simply picked up the phone, called the doctor, gotten a magical butt injection, and gone back to bed?

How did I not know this?!

I had suffered unnecessarily.

For hours.

Six feet from a trash can.

Apparently all I needed to do was make a phone call and drop my pants.

Then the doctor explained that the seas had been unusually rough that night.

In fact, he compared them to the conditions you sometimes experience crossing the Drake Passage.

You know.

The Drake Passage.

The exact body of water we had intentionally avoided by flying to Antarctica instead.

We had literally chosen the flight option so we wouldn’t have to cross it.

Apparently the Drake took that personally.

Oh, you thought you were getting out of this?

And came looking for me anyway.

Thankfully, the seas were much calmer for the rest of the trip.

And let me tell you something:

I became the most responsible seasickness-medication taker on that ship.

Every six hours.

Like clockwork.

Sarah never had to remind me again.

Lesson learned.

But there was one permanent casualty from that night.

Eggplant.

Apparently my brain decided that eggplant was responsible for the entire ordeal.

Completely unfair.

But once you associate a food with spending half the night on a ship bathroom floor, there is really no coming back from it.

To this day, I cannot eat eggplant.

The ship recovered.

I recovered.

The eggplant never did.