Being ill

Instead of writing a blog entry about my new nephew (congrats Emma and Peter!!), I'm going to write about altitude sickness. Perhaps it will make him wish to become a mountaineer! I didn't expect to get ill. In fact, I thought that we'd have a fun drive into the mountains, take a few photos and look cool and trendy. I started to doubt my ability to look cool when all the joints in my body started to ache as our car went higher and higher into the mountains. This wasn't just a little pain - it hurt!! However, I put this down to the fact that the road was a dirt track and extremely bumpy - and three of us were squeezed into the back of the car for about seven hours. We kept going higher. My head started to feel as if it would explode. I put this down to the fact that I'd been standing outside in a blizzard for a while having some photos taken or that I hadn't had a coffee for more than ... 3 days ... or that breakfast had been a soup of liquidised chillies and peppers!

During our lunch stop, I bought myself a coke (I didn't know the Tibetan for "I'd like a coke" and so I just pointed). But that didn't help much. We finally arrived at the house where we stayed the next two nights. This cheered me up ... it definitely was an "I'm going to make uncle Mel jealous" moment (it's not clear why I think of Mel everytime I stay somewhere that looks as if it may fall down during the night) . Our room didn't have any heating. It was about -2C. The "bathroom" had a very smelly squat toilet with a shower over it. The water for the shower or toilet worked sometimes. However, the view was amazing and my head cleared up. So I was fine when we went to dinner. What a place. The kitchen looked like something from about 1750. The stove needed stoking with coal. There were big pots hanging up. A bit of a fish was stuck on the wall. Lots of people kept walking in and out. We ate a superb dinner and I decided that the best medicinal cure for whatever I had was to drink lots of beer. It worked fine. Neither Sha nor I could sleep much that night. She was in a bad way in the morning, whereas I felt fine. However, Sha - rather sensibly - took some strong altitude medication and started to improve. I didn't take any medicine and started to get worse. Lying on the bed seemed to induce an uncontrollable shaking that only stopped by munching on a heap of paracetemol.

The views were stunning as we took the photographs that day. Unfortunately, I banged my head on a beam in a house where we were getting changed, which didn't help my health! Apart from having low beams, that house really was incredible. I was let into the bedroom to change into my suit. Obviously the entire family slept together (I couldn't see any sign of heating and it must have been freezing in the middle of the winter) on lots of wooden beds spread around the room. The room was incredibly decorated with rugs and everything was red. This was the house where the hosts enthusiastically took delivery of their yak's head.

That evening the shivering was worse, but I took more tablets. On the journey back we stopped to take more photos. This was great for me because I didn't seem to feel the cold at all. Everyone else was complaining about how cold it was, but I was having a great time. I was also happy to have succeeded in using a squat toilet for the first time without falling over. The car ride back was actually fine. I was sometimes hot and sometimes cold, but not too bad. We had another incredible lunch where the vegetables were something the cook had found on the mountains (they looked like tiny ferns).

We arrived back at Chengdu and met back up with Sha's parents. They're amazing. Without even checking-in to their hotel room, they had given me some tablets, a dramatic back massage and got me into bed. I was clearly not better the next day and so they took me to the hospital where we immediately found that my temperature was 39.5C. I had a blood test (all fine) and then diagnosed as having altitude sickness (the only official requirements at the hotel was that I had to give my name 'Jiaozi' and my age - which Sha got wrong). I was put into a bed and a stream of pretty nurses came to set up a saline drip. Sha took my glasses away.

At this point it was rather clear that I wasn't going to be giving lectures on pulsars in Chongqing and so we got me a ticket on Sha's flight to Beijing and went off to the airport. Rather stupidly, I demanded a coffee (after having not eaten for a day) and then almost fainted and was sick. Then I felt better. Since then, I've been lying at Sha's home in Beijing with my temperature going up and down, shivering and sweating heaps. Amazingly, I ate some salt and now feel 100x better. Sha's dad has just walked in a a huge plate of strawberries for me to eat. They've been absolutely amazing!