For Unlucky Kids, the Road Is a Place Where You Lose Your Lunch

The scene was a familiar one. A family sedan came to a skidding halt in the Kings Canyon rest area, doors flew open and an ashen-faced boy of about 9 fell out, limping as far away from the car as he could get before doubling up and reacquainting himself with his lunch.

Meanwhile, his two older sisters had hopped out, watching the proceedings with giggling disgust, while Mom did what she could with a few tattered tissues, and Dad turned away and scrutinized the view.

“He always gets carsick,” said one of the girls to a stranger, who approached to offer paper towels. “We never do. It’s grooosss.”

With a child’s ruthless clarity, she had summed up one of the great dividing lines of our species. It is a line that blurs a bit in adult hood, when many who suffered as children get over it, and many who didn’t later experience it as adult-onset airsickness. But among children, you either get carsick or you don’t. And if you do, there is absolutely nothing worse in the whole wide world.

I was reminded of this on a recent car trip when I came down with stomach flu. Leaning my clammy brow against the glass, I was instantly transported to my childhood, when any drive longer than 45 minutes necessitated a painful decision: Take the dreaded Dramamine with its aftereffects of cement-footed torpor, or risk hours of nausea, possibly resulting in the worst of all calamities--the intra-auto puke.

No one quite knows what causes motion sickness, although it is frequently blamed on a sensory mismatch: Within the car, things are relatively stationary, yet the car itself is moving. Unsure what is really going on, the inner ear and the portion of the brain controlling nausea hit Defcon 5--eject, eject, eject.

Although it is impossible to quantify the number of people who suffer chronically from carsickness, it seems to affect children more than adults.

“Kids tend to vomit more often than adults,” says Dr. David Keene, a Beverly Hills pediatrician, “so it’s hard to tell if they get it more often or if they are just more sensitive. As with any sort of pain, some people are just more sensitive than others.”

It isn’t a condition to worry about, he adds, unless an older child previously unaffected suddenly starts getting dizzy or disoriented in the car. And an assortment of drugs are available, including Dramamine, Bonine or the Transderm-Scop patches, although each has side effects.

“It can be a really incapacitating problem for those children who have trouble even making a short trip,” says Keene.

Pills only address the physical symptoms. The other consequence of being in the carsick camp is a perpetual sense of shame. It makes you different, in an obviously bad way. To her non-suffering peers, the carsick child, like the child prone to sunburn or the one with asthma, is seen as an attention-sucker, a slower of progress and, quite possibly, a big fat faker.

The little boy in the Kings Canyon pullout knew the score. As soon as he was able to raise his head, he declared himself fine. Let’s just wait, his mother said. “No, I’m fine,” he insisted, white as a sheet, and bravely got back in the car.

Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mary.mcnamara@la times.com.