Didn't feel very well when I woke up this morning but didn't have an awesome night's sleep so probably just a little tired. Woke up at 6 am promtly from a knock on the door from Nima. Got ready quickly and headed across the path to breakfast. We ate our porridge as the donkeys next to us ate from their feed bags. We started with a warmup dance much to the amusement of the owners of the tea house and the porters. It involves standing in a big circle and yelling very loudly a song to which there are hand movements, and then we were off. The hike before lunch was very steeply uphill making for a sweaty morning going through 3 Litres of water. Got to lunch and felt really ill, thought that I just hadn't drunk enough water during the hike as we are still going through a jungle-like part of the mountains and it's still very hot during the day. Went to go fill up my Camelback and Nalgene from the tap, which was boiling hot (good for bacteria, not good for gulping). While I was doing this I had left my little glass bottles of water purification tablets out on the side and had taken the cotton balls out of the iodine tablets. A curious horse (who I hadn't seen) came over ate the cotton, knocked over the bottle and began eating the tablets. He did not seem pleased when i interrupted him. I have been assured iodine does not injure horses. Whew. At least it wasn't a cow. Here is Nepal killing a cow carries a life jail sentence. Sadly the one and only thing we were warned about when we got here.
Sat down to wait for lunch and began to shiver. I felt freezing although everyone else in the group was overheating. Rachel leant me her down jacket which I put on and I tried to take a nap before lunch. Woke up 2 hours later feeling even worse. Really really nauseous. Didn't even manage to eat anything at lunch. We've gained over 1000 meters today so far so it could be attributed to the altitude which apparently affects some of us earlier than others. Shona tried to get me to eat something but the last thing I wanted to do was eat. Toby gave me some rehydration salts which tasted surprisingly good. Not what you want to say. Apparently rehydration salts taste awful if you don't need them and I thought it tasted wonderful. Still didn't feel well but figured the best thing to do would be to try to power through it. I tried to take my mind off being sick by chatting and playing games with the others. Games make the hills go faster but as everyone started to become short of breath the games died out and it became harder to ignore how bad I was really feeling. I started to feel more and more like I was going to be sick. I finally stopped and retched but nothing came up. My throat and eyes just burned. The nausea continued and Shona, Naomi and I dropped behind the group and I started to feel sicker and sicker and the retching became more and more frequent. I still wasn't managing to throw anything up. Gross but true, after about an hour of this I couldn't take it anymore and stopped to make myself sick. Bad Idea. I only threw up liquid and bile but the retching continued but worse. The bile just got worse and the retching became every few steps. Nima started to get really concerned as he had never seen anyone ill like this and became even more concerned when it became apparent I had quite a fever. We got nearer and nearer where we were spending the night and right before we arrived there we came across a medical outpost and Nima insisted we stop and I get checked out.
When we got the outpost there was no one there so Nima went in search of the doctor who ran the post. Sadly there was no doctor, but a nurse who only spoke Nepali. As she watched me dry heaving as Nima tried to explain how I'd been doing she attempted to convince him that I wasn't in fact ill but pregnant. Probably my first clue there I should have taken her advice with a pinch of salt. After Nima persuaded her that was not the case and she agreed to examine me. She felt and listened to my stomach which is quite swollen and told Nima that I had too much acid in my stomach. She told me to only eat boiled rice and gave me anti nausea medicine and chalk to eat. When we left the outpost it only took a couple of minutes for us to reach where some people from the group were waiting for us. T.C. was really lovely and took my backpack off me to take up to the tea house.
The tea house looks like something out of a sci-fi movie, a house in the clouds. It was pretty cool looking but very cold. We all sat round in the communal room around the stove playing games while we got out rooms assigned. Embarrassingly Nima was still very worried about me and had one of the porters bring my pack up to my room and wouldn't let me bring it up myself but to be honest I wasn't feeling up to even that. We sat around and waited for dinner which I still wasn't very interested in. I still kept feeling like retching but tried to hold it back and I really hoped that the medicine would begin to work. Had some boiled rice and broth for dinner and headed to sleep, hoping I feel a lot better tomorrow.
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