First word, five letters

By now we all know that my mom will jump at and be scared by absolutely anything and everything on this planet. While I do not share this trait completely, I will say that being awakened and scared by sounds or events at night, is something I can totally sympathize with. If I am awakened at night, whether by a person, a loud noise, an alarm clock (or pretty much anything else in the entire universe) I jump sky high and my heart explodes. Usually I can also feel the pulse in my head, I can't make sense of where I am, I'm confused by any rational thought, and I am basically waiting to meet my demise. But I guess that's totally normal, right? In fact, I vividly remember as a kid one time being about 9-years-old in our first house here in Lakeland and a stack of books fell over in my room in the middle of the night and I'm pretty sure I had a near-death experience. I freaked out, hid under the covers, and my heart rate was WAY above healthy limits for at least four hours. It was the worst experience of my life. And don't even get me started on the time a picture frame fell off the wall in my bedroom two summers ago... Anyway, so you can imagine the awesome night I had last night when at about 2:45am I was jolted awake by Cindy at my bedside. Normally she comes into our room at night, but just to crash on the floor or tell me she has to go to the bathroom. But this time she came in moaning. I was so jolted awake I couldn't even process what was happening. She was wailing and pointing to her mouth. Me, in my super-intelligent sleepy stupor, thought she was trying to tell me something about her other loose tooth. I began going through those questions, "Did your tooth fall out? Does your tooth hurt? Do you think you need braces? Do you want to change dentists?" Charades was never really my favorite game. But all my questions were answered when she began to upchuck right there by my bed. I woke up real fast after that! She managed to contain herself to the hallway, but that was it. There was no further attempt to make it to the bathroom. On the bright side, my heart rate was able to return to normal levels over the next hour as I cleaned the wood floor and contemplated my life as an 24-hour on-call janitor. Hopefully there won't be any more emergencies until after I retire :)