18 April – Locust Cove Gap

I woke up around 7 a.m. and went down a short trail to get water for the day.  As I passed one guy, he said simply “We have the same shirt. . . ”  Normally– who cares?  But he knew it was significant.  This is a highly prized very warm ‘waffle’ undershirt that you only get issued if you are deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan, so of course I stopped and we talked.  He is a fellow Army veteran and has gone on two deployments to Iraq: great guy.  Again, everyone I met at this campsite and others are people really worth meeting. 

The morning started off well.  I commiserated with a few people I had met last night as we were setting up.  I made some Ramen noodles which felt like they were going to stay down this time.  I began to pack up my stuff and we were talking when one guy mentioned an Australian who had been annoying at their last hostel because he was drunk and ‘couldn’t find his clothes’.  Then he said casually “I quit drinking a long time ago.”   I then said “I quit drinking almost 7 months ago and I go to AA.” 

He looked at me and  said “Yeah, I still go to meetings once in awhile but I quit 37 years ago.  I quit drinking because I ended up in a tree.” 

Now we all stopped and looked at him.  And this begin a general discussion of AA, and drinking in general.  OK: let’s have it– what happened?”  He was blacked out while driving and flew off an embankment that had a drop-off on one side so steep that his vehicle wrecked in treetops and stuck there.  He remained blacked out, woke up the next morning, surveyed his predicament carefully and shimmied down the tree.  He walked away with barely a scratch and quit drinking that day.  A few others begin to talk about drinking and AA and of course everyone had nothing but good things to say about it.  One woman’s husband was in AA, etc. and we were talking casually when the gazelle spoke up.  

This guy had loped into our campsite last night and set up as we were all settling in and was fairly quiet as is usual when moving into a new site and setting up initially.  It was late and no conversation really happened beyond ‘Hey’.  I had noticed him, however, due to his unusual black-and-white vertically striped shorts, his long red hair in a ponytail, and his long legs.  So, on the heels of this drinking discussion the next morning he suddenly volunteers as he’s packing up “Yeah, I was a bartender for 10 years, I had to get out of that, wow, we were pretty much expected to drink!”  He told us a couple of fun stories about how all they did was drink and so that got him into the discussion. 

We exchange names with him as we had done among ourselves the night before, and then we asked him the usual opening banter question “Where did you come from last night and how far do you expect to make it today?”  He told us where he had travelled from yesterday and we all stopped packing and eating and looked at him.  It worked out to about 29 miles.  We were stunned.  And that included the hellacious mountains we’ve all been struggling with.  We pressed him- What?  “Yeah, that’s about what I’ve been averaging.”  Unpretentiously.  OK.  Now we are really talking to this guy. 

It turns out that he’s an ultra-marathon runner and is just doing the Appalachian Trail for the fun of it:  his real next goal is to win a race called Last Man Standing.  This is a race where all entrants must complete 4 miles within an hour, every hour, and the last man standing wins.  Of course,  4 mph is easy for the first couple hours, but here we are talking about hard-core ultra-marathoners and last year he dropped out at 185 miles.  Do the math.  What’s interesting is the sleeping and food component here.  If you complete a circuit of 4 miles, (it’s a 4 mile circuit that you keep doing over and over), early and have, say, 10 minutes left in the hour, then you may eat or sleep during those 10 minutes before you have to start the next circuit.  If you make it just in time, then you must keep going. 

You can see how this would wear people down, but, now get this, he’s entering this race with an ulterior motive:  if he wins, and he thinks he has a shot at it!, then he might! qualify for yet another race called the Barkeley Marathon that he told us about. 

Jesus H. Christ.  You have to Google that one. 

Well, it was awesome talking to this monster athlete and things eventually died down and people started moving back onto the trail. 

That’s when the stock market took another downturn. 

As I was packing, honest to God, the last couple items into my pack, I felt the horrific dreaded God Please No nausea return and I sat down for a moment begging the powers that be for this not to be happening. My head started to swim again, I staggered into the woods and began to vomit violently for the third day in a row, and I felt my strength leaving me rapidly. 

With great and soon delirious effort,  I set my tent back up again.  I knew I had to lay in my tent yet again all day to ride this out but as the day progressed I knew that something was even more different today.  I was having less and less strength to dart out of the tent to vomit and I begin to consider throwing up just outside my tent by just sticking my head out which is gross and stupid of course.  Hour after hour goes by and it’s now early afternoon.  My last urine was brown.  I’m writhing in the tent, can’t get rid of the nausea, can’t eat or, more importantly, drink, as nothing stays down.  I know I’m in real trouble here.   I’m in and out of strange quick bizarre disturbing dreams. 

I slowly and carefully considered all my options and came to the following conclusions: nobody out here can help me unless they’re carrying IVs; nobody can carry my pack so that I could stagger out of the woods as their own packs are too much already; if I stay here all day I will be in real, real, trouble.  Finally, I realized that if I just got up in my shorts and shirt, leaving everything behind me, I would probably not make it to the nearest road which was 3.7 miles of tough Trail from me. 

I finally decided mid afternoon that I probably need to get some medical help.  But I still thought about it and really just kept trying to go to sleep to get rid of the sick and awful feeling in my whole body.  Given that this was my third day in this situation, and today’s degradation of condition was increasing in pace, I realized that this wasn’t funny anymore.  I rolled to one side mid afternoon and called my Insurance plan’s military nurse advice line.  The nurse talked to me at great length and was greatly concerned.  She got her boss on the phone who was equally alarmed. 

They asked all the right questions of course, food and water intake, medications I was on, the amount of time I had been there, what I was doing,  where I was,  etc. and then the boss said simply “You’re gonna call 911 and get to an Emergency Room right now and we’re gonna figure out a way to get you out of there” so I decided to do it.  This was an interesting decision for me because I only call 911 every 60 years or so. 

Nevertheless, I felt a surge of emotion about the thought of IVs going into my system without triggering nausea.  We got the 911 call going.  I was on the phone for a long time with a really nice person who hooked up the following sequence of events:  Forest Service folks would find me.  (Here they asked me the question gingerly if I could walk out on my own if someone carried all my stuff; they were going to carry me out otherwise.  Knowing it was 3.7 miles to the nearest parking lot, I hesitated but said ‘Yes’ knowing that I’d drop within the first mile easily, but they would at least know they weren’t wasting their time with me.) 

The first Forest Service guy arrived way quicker than I thought he would.  I heard his radio static outside of my tent!  Add two parts elation with one part humiliation in a large bowl.  Add sincere help, mix, and Hope rises.  It turns out that they had an amazing shortcut to get me to a logging road to start the process.  Their EMT told me I needed to get to an Emergency Room.  They helped me pack my stuff and they carried my stuff to their trucks.  They were very nice in all regards.  A military guy there saw my Ranger patch on my backpack and they all treated me with great deference and professionalism.  From the logging road I was transferred to an ambulance which quickly started an IV. 

That was the moment I won’t forget- just seeing that IV hanging above me in the ambulance was amazing because I knew I was getting fluids that I would not throw up and that would be the beginning of the end of this nightmare.  She also gave me an anti-nausea medication and 35 minutes later I was at Swain Hospital in Bryson City North Carolina.  The whole trip from the tent to the emergency room bed I was in was dreamlike and I was in an out of it having strange thoughts and snippets of dreams the whole time.  It was interspersed with lucidity and casual conversation with the folks attending to me.

So, at the Hospital, they did all kinds of tests,  gave me morphine,  more anti-nausea medication, and more IV fluids and I begin to feel better.  Ultimately the Doctor, who was also extremely nice and patient, diagnosed a virus, severe dehydration, and sunstroke. 

Note that we also talked at length about Lyme  Disease -which I got in 2007.  And the fact that I believe my immune system has been compromised ever since to the extent that whenever I get a little bit sick crazy stuff happens.  And I was feeling the crazy stuff throughout this entire three day sickness; for example, my spine and the bones in my arms and neck were very cold and they could not put enough blankets on me.  This was a classic symptom I endured during my Lyme Disease in 2007.  He seemed to believe this though it is controversial medically- the fact of chronic versus acute effects.  He prescribed not just the anti-nausea medication upon my release,  but also Doxycycline which is specific to treating Lyme Disease.  I very much appreciated this. 

So yes I was released that evening having had two IVs and morphine and anti-nausea medication.  I was able to get to a nice little hotel where I am now.   I still have no interest in food but know I should start eating food.   I’m drinking a little bit of ginger ale mixed with water and taking the medications and getting tons of sleep and, well,  what a strange day.

We’ll see what happens next.

As they say, “Happy Trails!”