Okay, so Spectra and I spent 6 days here:
We stayed in a resort and spent hours every day just floating in a crystal clear sea with that blue-green tint. When we weren’t doing that we were watching monkeys (specifically macaques and langurs) and sometimes we did these things at the same time. The first four days all we did was wake up, go the beach, float around in the water until midday, return to the room to rest up (code for let the sun pass its peak UV hours) and then returned to the beach to float around again for a couple of hours and watch the sunset. Then we ate, watched a movie, and went to bed.
It was beautiful but it isn’t terribly interesting. There was some rock climbing, a hidden lagoon, and a cave. Again, these things were beautiful, intermittently strenuous, and a couple of times a bit harrowing, but they weren’t terribly interesting. At least not in blog format. Then we both got food poisoning, which was a little interesting so I’ll talk about that for a second here.
I woke up with food poisoning, it wasn’t terrible, I only had one uncomfortable experience sitting on the toilet, and then I spent half the day drifting in and of sleep while rolling around in bed. In the early afternoon Spectra felt like she might be coming down with a little something too. At about 4 I was feeling well enough to walk very slowly to the pool to sit next to Spectra at which point she needed to return to the room to vomit. Here things got bad for her very quickly.
Spectra got seriously sick--many, many trips to the bathroom for a variety of purposes--and I was weak but feeling essentially okay. Shortly before 7pm Spectra suddenly needed to vomit again. Her side of the bed was closest to the bathroom. I got out of bed to assist but before I got around the bed she was on her hands and knees vomiting on the floor. This was less disgusting that it might sound because the floor was marble and the vomit was nothing but water.
I’d redirected my movement toward the bathroom to get something for the water/vomit when Spectra keeled over. In the moment before she hit the floor I didn’t really think, much of it. I thought she was just exhausted, but the sickening thick/hollow thud of her head smacking against the floor instantaneously told me I was wrong. She was lying on her side with her face against the floor. I knelt down to roll her over to get a look at her and the moment I saw her eyes I was no longer sick in the slightest.
Spectra’s eyes were wide open but not focused. I said her name but she didn’t respond. I mean not even a glimmer. In that moment I’m not checking her pulse or sticking a mirror under her nose to see if it fogs up. In that moment I’m thinking “she’s dead” and trying to simultaneously keep my wits and act exceedingly fast at the same time.
I said her name several more times as I gently but firmly slapped her cheeks (JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES). Here I’m sweating. I’m so far from being sick that I felt like I needed to start running, pointlessly, to deal with the amount of energy I had. Then before I could decide whether to pick her up and put her in the bed before deciding whether to call the front desk before or after starting CPR her eyes started moving around and she focused on me.
“What happened,” Spectra asked.
“You got out bed to vomit…” I started to reply.
“And then I fainted. This has happened before,” She said.
I knew what she was referencing. In Ecuador about a decade ago Spectra got food poisoning and spent half a day fainting before laying on the floor of a bus rumbling up a mountain drinking a bottle of pedialyte drop by drop under threat of, “If you can’t keep it down we’re stopping in the next town and leaving you at the hospital.” She managed to keep the pedialyte down. Spectra was dehydrated and if she couldn’t keep anything down we were going to have to know where the nearest hospital or clinic was.
Again, Railay isn’t an island but it might as well be. As soon as Spectra’s wits had fully returned and I had her set up comfortably in bed I went to the front desk to ask, as calmly as possible, where the nearest hospital or clinic was. It wasn’t on the peninsula but not to worry, it was a quick boat ride away with one caveat:
The boats stopped running at 11pm because after that it was “too difficult.”
So Spectra had four hours to determine if she needed to go to the hospital and after that we were up a stump and here’s where the story mercifully gets back to being boring. Spectra didn’t throw up again and managed to keep her pedialyte down. She went to bed early and the next day we both woke up feeling essentially fine. Weak, and not very dining adventurous, but fine.
We spent half a day recuperating and then had one last day feeling pretty okay that included kayaking. The trip back to the airport included wading out in thigh deep water wearing 45 pound packs to a longtail boat, which was challenging and worth it but not really something that seems important enough to get into here. It looked something like this:
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| That's what we did but going the other way. |
I’ve often wished there were a camera filming me so I could go back and watch to see either how I actually behaved in situations where I couldn’t tell or to see how my recollection of what I’d done conformed with reality. Usually it’s because a social encounter has soured and I had to act like I was still interested in or not horribly offended by someone. Am I good at that acting? Of course I think so, but am I?
In this case I wish I could see how I really reacted in those few seconds between Spectra’s head thumping against the floor and getting her into the bed. Was I calm? Did it look like I was rapidly trying to process a suddenly overwhelming number of small choices that had to be made instant by instant? Or did I just sort of shut down and start doing dumb stuff like slapping her in the face? Of course I don’t really know and the only witness was out of her head at the time so it’s unlikely I ever will know. And in this case, I’d rather not get another opportunity to find out.
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