October 14th. The Day
of The Vesuvius, aka The Day I Vomited for Ten Straight Hours. WARNING:
GROSSNESS AHEAD. I did not hike this
day, I did not attend mass, I did not venture further from my bunk than the
bathroom until after 7PM – and then only because I was so weak from hunger that
I had tunnel vision.
There are no pictures from October 14th, although if I’d had
the forethought of my friend Katie, I could have taken some excellent self-shots
from the hostel bathroom at 4AM.
Instead, the night and day went something like this: I woke up at 10PM
to the first rumblings of trouble in my gut and shuffled my bleary-eyed self to
the bathroom. Nothing doing. I came back to my bed, drank water, tried
unsuccessfully to fall back asleep. Things
get more… insistent. I return to the
bathroom for round two of the waiting game.
I have a sense I might need to throw up, but it’s just not at that point
yet. Back to bed, to the grumbles and
snores of a hundred other pilgrims. I
notice outside the weather is dramatically stormy.
Ten minutes later I’m racing to the bathroom, where I spend 90% of the
next 6 hours in a cement stall the size of a coat closet, crouched over both
the toilet and a rapidly filling trashcan at
the same time. There is a tiny
prison window in the wall in front of me, and it will not close… which is just
aces since I am definitely running a fever, experiencing alternating hot
flashes and cold chills, and the temperatures outside have dropped to just
above freezing and a driving rain is… um… driving itself through the window and
onto me.
I guess I should have been grateful for the light shower given my
increasing level of filth (Ever seen a 2-liter coke bottle explode? There’s a significant kill radius, and I’m in
an enclosed space.), but mainly I was just cold, wet, and miserable.
I have adventures during this period, mostly involving searching out
fresh rolls of toilet paper in between bouts of projectile vomiting. Emptying my trash can into another, larger
trash can with a lid, without being caught.
Attempting to drink water unsuccessfully. Crying.
Around 7AM I have, I think, come through the worst of it and fall
fitfully asleep. I know I won’t be able
to get up and hike that day, and I’m convinced I have food poisoning. I am unresponsive as Robert, Esther, and
company get up and leave, and the short periods I am awake I am terrified and
depressed that if I can’t hike for more than a day I will most likely be unable
to finish the Camino in time to get back to the U.S. Think on that for a minute. It was a low, low point.
Around 10AM I am woken by the hospitalera who has come into the room to
clean. I get up and attempt to tell her
I am sick and beg to stay another day.
She doesn’t understand. I
pantomime a fever, vomiting, and diarrhea until her eyes get big and she nods
her head, gesturing for me to go back to sleep.
On my way to the bathroom a couple of hours later, she has found an
early-arriving pilgrim who speaks a tiny bit of English to ask me what I
need. I ask if there is a soda machine
anywhere, and if there is a place to get ibuprofen. She says no, but she can call a taxi to take
me the 15 miles to a pharmacy or the 30 to a doctor. I say no, but I feel so sick that I believe I’ll
eventually have to go to the hospital, I’ll lose all my money, and go home
having come so close to the end of the pilgrimage and left it unfinished.
When I come out of the bathroom, she and another hostel worker are
moving my stuff to the bed closest to the bathroom. The next time I wake up, there is a giant
bottle of Coke next to my bed. I have no
idea where the hospitalera got it from, but it’s there. When I wake up after that, she has found a
pilgrim who has an entire sheet of prescription strength ibuprofen for me –
Danielle, the Canadian woman who was herself sick in Astorga.
Finally, when I wake up with enough confidence to clean myself up a bit
and go in search of food, I look everywhere for the hospitalera but can’t find
her. I remember as a blur, more the idea
of a kind, soft-voiced woman than an actual person, but I’ll be damned if her
small caring actions didn’t save me from wholehearted despair when I was
sick. I don’t even have the words for
how grateful I feel.
When I walk outside the hostel, there is freezing rain and it is so cold
that the 100-yard walk to a bar leaves me shaking with chill. I go in, slump at a table, and order soup. The waiter offers octopus stew and I almost
puke on the table. In my weak Spanish I
ask if he just has vegetable soup, some bread, and a soda, and he says yes,
backing away like I’m a plague creature.
I sit there, sipping my Coke, alone, until a thick, robust man in his
50s leaves the bar and comes over. I
tell him frankly that I’m sick and won’t be good company, and he says it doesn’t
matter. His name is David, from Belgium,
and he first orders a plate of octopus and then essentially forces me to eat my
food, punctuating his own conversation with orders, “Eat! You must eat or you will die! Eat, my friend!”. While I’m tackling my soup, he tells me that
he has walked from the front door of his house in Belgium all the way to Spain
and will complete the pilgrimage in honor of his first grandson. He never knew his grandfather, nor did his
father know his great-grandfather, so his tribute is to go on pilgrimage. He tells me that he worked in an industrial
plant for years but now trains police dogs in his retirement.
As he eats his octopus, he stops after nearly every bite to let loose a
series of brutal curses in English, Spanish, and Dutch. Apparently it is delicious, but painfully
spicy.
David is robust, matter of fact, large of heart and presence, healthily
thick of neck and chest, with just enough silliness about him to remind me of a
Hobbit. He’s the kind of middle-aged man
I want to be. Dinner is good, I leave
the table feeling better, and return to the hostel to get an uninterrupted
night’s sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment