I don’t know how to start this except to say that the past week has been pretty shitty. These are the days when you wish you had a group of good friends around to support you and help you feel better. When you are traveling alone, you generally have no one in which to confide, no one that can or will sympathize with what you are going through, and basically no one that cares about much other than themselves and their own adventure. This is great when you are having a good time, but quite depressing when you actually need to talk to someone. Now, some of these moments may be those that define you as a person, but they are by no means easy or fun to go through.
So now, maybe I should elaborate a bit about what is going on with me, and has been for the last week or so.
Update: The second I started to write this part, a guy I met earlier named Steve came in and sat in the hammock next to me (yes this hostel has a hammock room! 🙂 ). We started shooting-the-shit about life and women (he is divorced) and it kind of made me feel a little better about things. Lesson of the moment is that you should not be alone with your thoughts for too long, especially if it concerns a woman!
I will get back to that at the very end of the post. What I want to start with is that I am still sick, but with different symptoms than I had after New Years and Hogmanay in Edinburgh.
Here is all of the medicine and pills that I purchased in the past week:
Difflam: for a sore throat, to the point that I couldn’t speak.
4Flu: for a congested nose and a brutal cough.
Strepsils: for a sore throat (throat lozenge).
Opticrom Allergy Eye Drops: for red and puffy eyes that seemed to be caused by allergies.
Clarityn: for what seemed like allergies as a result of new plants in part of the hostel.
Sudafed: the good shit that actually works! Nasal Decongestant.
I didn’t take all of these at once, but, at different times, each seemed to help me feel better. If you just want one good one though, Sudafed is what you should get! But make sure that it has Pseudoephedrine in it or it is not the ‘good stuff.’ In the U.S.A., that means you will have to show a drivers license and are limited to one purchase per week or so I think; so just purchase the package with the largest number of pills so that you don’t run out.
About 4 or 5 days after I got to Dublin, I began to get sick AGAIN. I was just starting to feel better from my new years sickness New Years Edinburgh when I was hit with different and quite annoying symptoms. In one night, I went from being able to speak normally to not being able to talk at all the next day. I was not shouting or yelling or doing anything else that should cause this. The next day, my throat was in so much pain that I could not eat solid food for a day.
The day after that, my sinuses were so congested that I could not breath well enough to sleep through the night.
The day after that, I had some sort of reaction to something such that I couldn’t open my right eye the next morning until I took a hot shower.
This SUCKED. I was really sick, no doubt as a result of everyone else in the hostel being sick and the weather being freezing cold here with rain and no sun. So, just as I feel like I am dying and I can’t even leave the hostel because I am so weak, the…………… Needless to say, that left me quite devastated.
I may, at some point, elaborate on the last two sentences, but this is definitely one of the dips in the roller-coaster ride that is my current adventure. This is when you really need a few good friends around you.
I guess this is all just part of the adventure though!
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