Only the Strong Survive
In Irkutsk, the night of the big snow and the night before we were to leave for Lake Baikal, at midnight, without any warning, I GOT SICK. Very sick! So sick I don’t even want to talk about it, but I’ll mention it since it influenced the remainder of my trip in terms of what I ate, didn’t eat, and never wanted to eat again!
Strangely enough, in the middle of the night while flying on the plane from Chicago to Beijing, I was standing quietly in the dark at the rear of the plane chatting with a scientist from Johns Hopkins University. He was on his way to lecture at Beijing University and asked me where I was headed.
When I told him Mongolia and Siberia, he said, “Oh, let me tell you everybody gets sick from the food in Siberia” and gave me some advice on how to recover from dehydration.
Of course, I listened but knew I wouldn’t get sick because I had no intention of drinking anything but bottled water and eating very very carefully.
Which of course I had done---until our encounter with the shaman and the yak’s milk blessing and then the many courses at lunch in the Buryiat yurt. In both cases, I had tried to avoid any chance at a contaminated product----but it was all in vain.
All I know is I was sicker than I’ve ever been in my life all that night. I survived the night but sure didn’t want to! By morning I told Jean there was no way I could make it in the van ride all the way to Lake Baikal.
Jean calmly left the room---and in a few minutes came back with a handful of black charcoal pills. “Take these. They will help settle your stomach,” she said—and forced them on me.
Getting my stuff together, I dragged myself with Jean’s good assistance to the van and moved to the rear with the baggage to avoid all my colleagues. However, Julia took one look at me and said, “You look terrible. Get off the bus with me. You have to see a doctor.”
What ensued was a tribute to the kind approach of a gentle Siberian woman physician. She and Julia took me to an empty hotel room and with translations by Julia, she gave me a full medical exam. I guess she found I had no fatal illness because Julia said I was able to rejoin the group. (By the way, I asked about a charge, and the answer was, “no charge!”)
We were on our way to beautiful Lake Baikal on a snowy cold Siberian morning.
But for the moment, I couldn’t have cared less. I was simply trying to stabilize my queasy stomach and recover my health as quickly as I could. It turned out that that bout of food poisoning left me unable or unwilling to eat much of anything on the rest of the trip besides mostly hot tea, bread and rice. But hey, who cared? There’s a positive side to everything. I lost seven pounds by the time I got home!
[Go to Mongolia Part Five]
