Illness Confined Me to My Home. Then a Trip to London Set Me Free

20.11.2024 - 18:53 / cntraveler.com

This essay is the final installment in a series about traveling after confinement. Read more stories here.

In 2013 an epoch of complex and major illness in my life began when I dramatically collapsed during a flight from London to San Francisco. Chatting with the stranger seated beside me, I felt my body abruptly revolt: Sweat ran in fat drops down my face and into my eyes; my skin turned clammy; I thought I might vomit. When I told my seatmate that I wasn’t feeling well, he said with concern that I’d gone pale. Do you want to use the restroom? I nodded. He stood to let me into the aisle.

That’s the last thing I remember before I opened my eyes, lying in the center of the aisle with flight attendants huddled around me. They strapped me to an oxygen tank for the next six or so hours, swapping them out as I used each one up. I was unable to move or talk without exerting tremendous effort. Nothing like this had happened to me before. I thought I might die.

Once I reached the ER in San Francisco, I slowly began to regain my ability to move and speak, though it was only the beginning of my treacherous journey with illness. Today I am still not the woman I was when I was peaceably bathing in a deep claw-foot tub in Cornwall just a day before that fateful flight. I now travel with a long list of diagnoses and a makeup trunk crammed with pill bottles. I run quickly out of energy every day (or wake up with little energy to begin with), am assaulted by symptoms with no rhyme or reason, and must make any plan with Plans B, C, and D to go with it.

Going to the UK in 2013 had been a secluded experience. I was there for a women’s personal development retreat in the Cornish countryside, for which I was whisked from Heathrow straight to a manor home where we created life maps, made vision boards, discussed our personal challenges, and ate our fill of gluten-free cake. I saw little else of the country. On the way back to the airport, I happened to look out the car window and was surprised by Stonehenge, which I hadn’t realized was in the vicinity—or even in the UK—at all.

But as isolated as my time at the Cornwall estate was, it had been a choice, and falling ill meant that the four years of my life that followed—my years of recovery—were a different kind of seclusion. I dealt with excruciating symptoms, including the inability to control my wildly fluctuating body temperature, daily bouts of nausea, lightheadedness, and crushing fatigue. I endured a seemingly endless carousel of medication trial and error, an assortment of experimental treatments, and frequent doctor appointments.

And so my life became one where I stayed at home. For years my days’ rhythms were controlled by how my body felt at any given moment.