It’s clear that I’m rapidly going downhill after the first day. The combination of no sleep, jet lag, walking 21km on wet day in late winter was a sure fire recipe for bronchitis.
This is my best guess.
But also, I never get sick. I’ve got a hardy constitution. The year before, I caught covid - omicron variant, but it barely made a dent in my system. I was allowed 10 days off work and spent most of the time at home eating cornflakes, watching Mad Men, cleaning and organizing, and I also filed my taxes.
Anyways.
I checked into one hotel for the night, thinking that I would just “shake it off” and start walking the next day. Silly me. I got into my room, ordered room service, threw up and took a 30 minute hot shower. Then I crawled into bed and sweated. After I woke up from a shitty nap, I blearily made my way down the street to the pharmacia, where I bought throat lozenges and something to loosen up the phlegm clogging up my lungs.
That hotel was booked up the next night, so I found another hotel in Zizur Mayor, a suburb of Pamplona, and holed up there for nine long days.
I have another theory as to why I got sick. Walking all day in the rain and mud, wearing a 10kg backpack, angry at everything, and scream-crying in a forest loosened something. It felt like a long-awaited eruption that had been simmering just beneath the surface. Also, in Chinese medicine the lungs and lung meridian store grief. And seeing as how I was currently a walking sack of grief….bronchitis made sense.
I laid in that bed for over a week, coughing, sometimes straight up choking on phlegm, which scared the shit out of me. All alone, in a different country, no one to take care of me. What if I choked to death? Who would know? Did it even matter?
It was finally on day seven when I realized I wasn’t getting any better and took a taxi into the city centre. I found a doctor who only charged me 50 euros, maybe because I was a “peregrina”, or maybe it was because of socialize medicine, and wrote me three prescriptions for medication, including a round of antibiotics (costing me a whopping 17 euros).
Taking the antibiotics was an immediate improvement. I hadn’t really had a fever since the first 36 hours of the sickness, but I still weak. I repacked my backpacked, bought snacks, and made preparations to start walking again.