signs of emetophobia as a child

I haven't ever known someone else with emetophobia in my "real life" (offline). I did have a strange indirect encounter with it several years ago when I happened to hear one of my bosses talking on the phone about her seven year old niece being hospitalized for refusing to eat while sick, because she was terrified of vomiting.

I don't really like telling people about my phobia in detail, and it especially seemed weird to tell my boss, but after hearing that, I couldn't resist emailing her and attaching some websites with more information. She thanked me for the information and said she would pass it on to the girl's mother. We never talked about it after that (which was a relief to me), so I don't know what happened with the girl, but I hope that if she did have the phobia, she got help for it early on. I know from experience that it only gets worse and more ingrained as you get older - you keep developing more and more avoidance behaviors.

I can think of so many obvious red flags from when I was younger that I'm sometimes shocked my family missed them:

• The biggest one, of course, being that whenever someone around me vomited, I would become upset or panicked. When I was very young, this usually bordered on hysteria. I can remember one time in a restaurant where I catapulted over a chair and ran out of the building to escape (and refused to go back in). As I got older, I tried to hide the response more, but I still would usually walk away quickly, avoid looking at the person, and then get extremely upset if I had to be in a confined space with them. I would try not to breathe or would bury my face in something thinking that might protect me from the germs. I would cry or sulk. Sometimes I would get really angry and be hostile to everyone around me.
• There was a time period (not sure how long it lasted) where I decided it was not safe to touch my food at all and would lift my plate or bowl to my mouth and eat like an animal.
• If anyone in the house was sick, I stayed in my room as much as possible. I tried to eat very little. I would sneak "safe food" into my room like individually wrapped packs of crackers. I was afraid to use the bathroom where someone had vomited, which usually meant I would start using my parents' bathroom, because the sick person was almost always one of my sisters.
• I can remember at least a couple freak-outs over me getting a little food stuck in my throat. It wasn't even enough to make me cough, but I still feared it meant I was choking, and that could lead to vomiting. One day my mom explained to me that I wouldn't be able to breathe or talk if I was choking, so then those panics stopped.
• I became extremely opposed to taking vacations with my family, because someone would usually get sick on them. When I vomited last, I was on one of these vacations. I also once had to spend eight hours in a car with my family after one of my sisters had almost vomited that morning.
• I would miss school because of my stomach hurting. From second to fourth grade, this happened rarely, about twice a year. In fifth grade, I had a period of about two weeks where I went home or stayed home every day. Each time I tried to go back, my stomach would hurt again as soon as I got into class, and I would have to leave. Since I was perfectly healthy, people were all over me asking what was "really" wrong, but I didn't know what to tell them, because I had no knowledge of anxiety at that point. In the years after that, I still sometimes went home "sick" because of panicking about something I imagined I felt, but never that many days in a row. I would say it was probably about seven days a year, spread out.

Those are all the signs I see looking back, and I imagine they'd be similar for any child developing this phobia. Not that I'm in a position to give parenting advice, but I would hope that any parent who saw their child exhibiting such irrational and anxious behavior would sit down with them and try to talk to them about it. And then if it does turn out that they fear vomiting, get them some counseling. I'm sure it's much easier to get something like this under control at a young age, maybe even cure it completely.