You know that moment when you say something and then you immediately realize that by saying it you’ve doomed yourself and it’s too late to do anything about it (except, perhaps, knocking on wood, but we all know how well that works)?
I had that moment in late December when I said, and I still don’t know what possessed me to say this — “my immune system must be way better this year, because I haven’t been sick at all.” WHAT WAS I THINKING. Actually, I know what I was thinking — I was feeling cocky because Macky had just had a terrible cold the week before and for once in my life, I hadn’t immediately been stricken down. Plus I had been eating vitamin C by the handful and even choking down the echinacea extract that Macky’s mom had been hawking since the first sign of sniffles, so how could I possibly get sick?
Obviously, I was sick within 24 of opening my big fat mouth. I might also have said “wow homeopathic medicine might actually work, I take back everything I ever said about it,” so now I’m just going to go ahead and un-take it back, because the echinacea was apparently a huge waste of my taste buds.
But this post isn’t about that cold. This post is about how, after being sick in December, I managed to get yet another death cold, less than a month later, and in New Zealand in the summer of all places, where no one should ever get sick ever because life is supposed to be perfect here.
This post is about what not to do to your body while you’re traveling and how, even though I know all these things, I did them anyway.
1. Don’t spend 35 hours on an airplane in a two week period. Or fine, do it, whatever, but pay half a rat’s ass worth of attention to your layovers. Don’t, for example, buy a flight that has a 35 minute layover in Beijing, because you’re going to have to go through customs, and you’re going to have to sprint to a gate that’s a mile away, and the air pollution is going to turn that little jog into a gagging, throat-stinging, hacking-up-green-stuff-for-the-next-week kind of affair. And it’s just not going to be worth the 72 dollars you saved on that flight. And also, if you’re going to have an eight hour layover in Brisbane on the last leg of your journey, bring a blanket. No, better yet, bring a fucking goosedown snow suit. Because, while it may be 35 degrees Celsius OUTSIDE, the airport is going to be air-conditioned to arctic levels, and you are going going to spend your eight hours spooning with your partner on a table because you can’t both fit on the benches and you will STILL BE FREEZING. And then, you know, you’ll be sick again, less than a week later.
2. Try to avoid undue amounts of stress. In other words, don’t end up in a situation where you have to stay up until 1 am every night to call people on the other side of the world to try to frantically coordinate things that are, realistically, completely out of your control anyway. Not only is this stressful, but it means you’re going to lose about a week’s worth of decent sleep, which just doesn’t help anybody. If Macky and I have learned anything from this situation, it’s this — international shipping is an expensive shit show and we will, hopefully, never deal with it again, especially not for anything larger than say, a small dog.
3. If you already feel like you’re getting a cold, maybe don’t go and add heat stroke to your list of problems. (This one’s for Macky.) The problem with arriving in a new place, is that you immediately want to get out and have fun, even if your body is sending you all the “fuck you” signs. This is how we ended up spending half the day at the beach, learning to wake board, picnicking, having a blast and getting sunburns over half our bodies (damn you, hole in the ozone layer, damn you). It was awesome, but it also left Macky with all the signs of heat sickness — fever, headache, nausea. And it left me googling “can you contract malaria in Thailand” and “what are the symptoms of hemorrhagic dengue” at five in the morning. For the record, I really don’t recommend googling the latter ever, much less if your loved one is exhibiting several key symptoms and you plan on going back to sleep after (“hey honey, wake me up if your nose starts bleeding or your pee turns brown, okay?”).
In case you didn’t pick up on this, we didn’t exactly get a running start on our New Zealand training trip. That doesn’t mean we haven’t been having fun, or that our trip to Southeast Asia wasn’t awesome, because we have, and it was. It just means that sometimes you can over do it, even if you’re us and you pretty much “over do it” for a living. For me, it’s a constant struggle to find and identify my limits, to balance wanting to do everything with, you know, that pesky turd called reality. And well, this past month, the balancing hasn’t gone so well. But I did ride a motorbike through Thailand, pet an elephant and eat my weight in noodles in Singapore. Oh, and I stayed up on a wakeboard for longer than 10 seconds. So if the price of those experiences is a week of coughing and sneezing, well, I guess I’ll pay up.
It’s not all bad….
