Breaking Free: A Journey of Self Discovery

by Chett Vosloo

  ***

  Even though we were already well into spring, the temperature in the mountains dropped quickly in the late afternoon. Most of the trekkers in the bungalow would therefore filter off to bed as early as six or seven in the evenings. Lying wrapped up in my sleeping bag on our sixth night on the trail, I woke up at midnight with a mild headache. The only thing I had in my medical bag was a box of headache tablets, a few sleeping tablets and some plasters. Not giving it any thought I leant over and popped a headache tablet, then rolled over to go back to sleep. The medicine helped for a while, but it wasn’t long before I awoke with another headache. This time I swallowed two headache tablets, thinking that this would surely do the trick. However, just as before, it helped for only a while as my sleep was disturbed yet again. Feeling tired and frustrated, and desperately wanting a good night’s sleep before the start of the next day, I took another two tablets as well as a sleeping tablet. It didn’t even cross my mind that these headaches were the first sign of altitude sickness, and that taking all these pills wasn’t a smart thing to do.

  When I got out of bed in the morning I wasn’t feeling that much better. Knowing that our seventh day was only a short three-hour hike to the next bungalow, 4 900 metres in altitude, I told Stefan to go on ahead without me. I wanted to spend the morning resting and would make a call at lunchtime whether or not to continue. By midday, my condition clearly hadn’t improved. Had I now done the sensible thing and hiked to a lower altitude, I’m sure I would have felt better in no time. However, being young and foolish, and not wanting to fall behind, I decided to hell with it and that I would carry on to the next bungalow 500 metres higher up in altitude to where I was now.

  The first two hours on the trail passed by with little difficulty. I didn’t see even one other person on the trail and was, at this stage, thinking that maybe I was going to be okay after all. I was, however, only fooling myself as it wasn’t long before my headache started to slowly creep back. Nausea and fatigue set in as well. By now I knew that I had made a big mistake by carrying on, but sadly, by the time I realised all of this it was too late to turn around. It would be getting dark soon and therefore I had no choice but to carry on up the trail to the next shelter.

  ***

  The first person I bumped into at the bungalow was a middle-aged lady. Dressed in colourful clothes, she had a real hippie look to her. She must have taken one look at me and known right away that I wasn’t doing well at all. “Are you okay?” she asked warmly.

  I shook my head and told her that I wasn’t feeling good at all. Lena, as she soon introduced herself, suggested that I sit and rest while she went and got me some garlic soup, which is supposedly a good remedy for altitude sickness. I couldn’t stomach any more than a few sips, as the smell alone made me want to get sick.

  After dumping my bags and catching up with Stefan for a little while, I went through to the eating area to sit next to the furnace. I figured that if I warmed myself up maybe it would help me feel better. Wishful thinking this was, as by now I was only going one way... and that was downhill! The altitude sickness had already dug its claws into me and there was little I could do now but grit my teeth until the next morning. Before going to bed, Lena gave me a tablet and told me to keep it with me in my room. “But Jed,” she warned, before handing it over to me, “only take this tablet if you’re in a really bad way. This tablet is a last resort and if you take it you’ve got no choice but to go down first thing tomorrow morning.”

  I nodded back at her and thanked her again for all her help.

  Not long after everyone turned in for the night, I decided that I had better get some sleep myself. Sleep, however, was something that just wasn’t going to come my way. With my head throbbing like it was, I knew that it was just a matter of time until I was sick. When I couldn’t put it off any longer I unzipped my sleeping bag and made a dash for the bathroom at the end of the hallway. With one arm around the toilet seat, and my other hand used to stick my fingers down my throat, I vomited up the little that I had in my stomach. I was by now so exhausted that I curled up in a little ball on the concrete floor after throwing up. Had it not been so freezing cold I probably would have stayed right there where I was the whole night, but with my body shivering like it was, I knew that I had better drag myself back to bed. The pain eased up for a while, but in no time I was feeling just as dreadful as before. When I went to the bathroom to get sick again, there was nothing left in my stomach to vomit up and so all I could do was gag, and each time I gagged I made these loud retching sounds as if someone were strangling me. I was sure that somebody was going to knock on the door any second, thinking that there must be someone dying in the toilet, but nobody came. I didn’t hear so much as a peep from the other rooms all night long.

  The rest of the night was complete hell. If I wasn’t lying in my bed tossing and turning in discomfort, I was on the bathroom floor gagging and fighting for breath. Ten minutes felt like an hour, an hour felt like a day. By midnight I was feeling so unbelievably shit that I truly didn’t know how I was going to make it through to the morning. Probably the most surprising thing of all was that I went the whole night without taking the tablet that Lena had given me. I guess her warning that if I took the pill I’d have no choice but to descend first thing the next morning had hovered in the back of my mind. Despite the misery I was going through, there must have still been a glimmer of hope that the altitude sickness would pass by and that it wouldn’t put an early end to my hike.

  ***

  First thing the next morning Lena came to check on me. I’m sure my eyes told the whole story and that there was no real need for her to ask how my night had been. “We really need to get you down,” she said softly.

  I felt as though I didn’t have the strength to get out of bed, let alone the strength to hike for a few hours to a lodge at a lower altitude. Lena came back a few minutes later with another hot cup of garlic soup. “Try to have some,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  As good as it may have been for me to get something into my stomach, I just couldn’t bring myself to have even one sip. Once again the smell of soup made me want to throw up.

  “Come, let’s get your stuff and we’ll go down together.” Of all the trekkers staying in the bungalow at the time, Lena just so happened to be the only one who was on her way down, and not up the trail. What a blessing this was, as I don’t know how I would have done it if I were alone.

  The first hour on the trail was torture. Every few hundred metres, I found myself on my hands and knees in the snow gagging and fighting for breath all over again. True to her word, Lena, my angel sent to help me, didn’t leave me for a minute and helped me every step of the way. She knew how important it was for me to get to a lower altitude and therefore she kept encouraging me to keep going. After dropping a few hundred metres in altitude, my condition very quickly started to improve. One moment I was feeling as if I was on my deathbed for sure, the next thing I was feeling my old self again. Both my headache and nausea had disappeared altogether, and my appetite had returned. Lena explained that this is why going down, even though it may feel like the last thing you want to do at the time, is so important when suffering from high altitude sickness.

  I spent that evening chatting with Lena in our lodge. She told me all about her life back home in Holland and of her love for travelling. She also told me that a few weeks back a young French girl had died from altitude sickness, more or less at the same altitude that we had been at the night before. For all this time it hadn’t really occurred to me how serious my situation could have been, which was so typical of me. Yet again I’d taken it one step too far and narrowly escaped what could so easily have been a disaster. I may well have been feeling my old self again, but all desire to have a second attempt at Mt. Everest Base Camp had vanished. The memory alone of what I had been through the night before was enough to put me off.

  After a second night of resting at the bungalow, I decided that I w
ould take a nice, easy walk back down the valley to Lukla. Before setting off, I gave Lena a big hug goodbye and thanked her one last time for all that she had done for me. What a strange feeling it was to now be alone. At first it felt like a novelty, as it was as if I had these gigantic mountains all to myself, but the flip side to being alone was that I had little distraction. Little distraction meant that the memory of what I had got up to at the full moon party in Thailand started to creep back into my thoughts. Slowly at first, but then the party... the girl... and what if she had AIDS, was all I could think about!

  CHAPTER 6

  For as long as I can remember, I have always been one of those guys who likes the ladies. At university it got even worse. Sleeping around was one thing, but sleeping around without protection - as I almost always did - was a different story. Six months into my first year at university, I woke up one morning with a scare and thought that maybe I should go and get tested. Absolutely terrified at the time, filled with the worst possible fear of what I’d do if the HIV result were positive, I made a desperate plea to God to help me out. This was actually quite funny, considering that this was probably the first time in all my life that I could remember praying. Yet still this didn’t stop me from trying to make a deal with God. You let me off the hook this time, and I promise to stop being so bloody stupid in the future. As sincere as my promises felt at the time, after only a few days of getting the result back to say that I was okay, I’d be back to my old ways of sleeping around without protection. Over the four years that I spent at varsity, I must have gone for three or four HIV tests. Each time the result came back negative, and each time I failed to learn the lesson that I was taking risks and playing with fire.

  On the night of the full moon party in Ko Phangan, a small island on the east coast of Thailand, one of the things that struck me the most was just how much sex seemed to be staring you in the face. With crowds of around 50 000 people, I watched time and time again how a Western guy would approach a Thai woman, the two would speak for a while, and then off they’d walk together. To be brutally honest, I was a little envious whenever I saw this as I was very attracted to Asian women and so I was also hoping to find a local Thai lady to go home with for the night.

  In the early hours of the morning, after several hours of prowling up and down the beach like a lion looking for its dinner, I spotted a Thai lady standing alone. Not wanting to waste this golden opportunity, I marched straight up to her and said, “Hi”. She was short, had a petite, tanned body and her hair was at shoulder length. In the dim light she looked gorgeous. We made small talk for a few minutes before walking off hand in hand, just like I had seen so many others do before me. Too drunk to drive a scooter back to our bungalow, I looked around to see where else I could take her. There was only one thing on my mind now and that was sex, so I knew that it had to be somewhere quiet and private. Walking away from the crowds, I led her to the far end of the beach. It looked dark and secluded. She didn’t raise any objections and so I assumed that she was just as up for it as I was. As we got closer, I realised that it probably wasn’t the most ideal of places as this end of the beach was covered with boulders. However, it would have to do as it didn’t look as if there were other options. As we made our way across the boulders hand in hand, I saw the silhouette of two naked bodies pressed up against one another. Then I saw the silhouette of another couple. Clearly we weren’t the only ones who had come here for sex. After a few minutes spent searching for a decent place, we eventually found a small area of sand hidden between a few boulders. Private, the full moon hovering in the sky above, the light of the moon shimmering off the ocean waves, it was perfect! However, it wasn’t the beauty of the moon and the ocean that I was interested in. I quickly lent forward to kiss her and immediately started to take off her clothes. Within a matter of seconds we were both standing there naked, kissing, our arms wrapped around each other. As turned on as I was, the last thing I was thinking about was safety and for me to use a condom. This was very stupid, really, as the full moon party in Thailand was hardly the sort of place to take risks. I didn’t have a clue who she had been with before me. You can be sure that I wasn’t the only one. What’s more, I still didn’t even know her name. Yet all of this didn’t even cross my mind. When we made our way back to the party after our time together behind the rocks, we said a brief goodbye before walking off in opposite directions. My ego was telling me, Well done, Jed, another feather in your cap. Another story for the boys, but in my heart I knew that the sex had felt dirty. So rather than deal with my conscience, I quickly turned a blind eye to it and pretended that it didn’t happen. However, as I’d come to realise yet again in my life, turning a blind eye and pretending that something didn’t happen isn’t the best solution. Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with it. It’s just a matter of how long you can carry on running.

  ***

  On our way up the valley I had spotted a hospital in one of the villages that Stefan and I had passed through. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but with the thought of whether or not I had AIDS in my mind, the idea came to me that maybe I should stop off at the hospital on my way down to Lukla. After my experience with altitude sickness a few days before, having an HIV test now was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did know that it would be absolute torture for me to wait until I got back home to South Africa to have the test done then. Once the idea had stuck that this was what I had to do, there was little else I could think about. I tried my best to stop worrying and to stop thinking the worst, yet it seemed just about impossible for me not to. What if the result came back positive, how would I tell my family that I had AIDS? These were the same haunting thoughts that I couldn’t get away from. If I wasn’t as scared as I was at that moment, I probably would have laughed at what a roller coaster ride it had been for me in the mountains. At first, I was thinking that I had arrived in a beautiful new world, then there was the altitude sickness, and now I was on my way to see if I could get an AIDS test done.

  “What can I do for you?” The doctor, a tall Western man with blonde hair, greeted me in the doorway. He introduced himself as Robert and said that he and his wife were the only two doctors working at the hospital at the time. This was the part I always hated about going for an AIDS test. I wasn’t sure whether to beat around the bush about what I wanted, or to just spit it out and lay it on him that I’d been stupid in Thailand and that I needed to get tested. After stuttering for a while with a whole lot of ‘errs’ and ‘umms’, I eventually told him my story. Robert quickly shook his head and said that he was sorry, but that he couldn’t help me as the hospital didn’t have the equipment to do an HIV test. With this option now out the window, I guessed that I was just going to have to wait until I got back home to South Africa to get myself checked out there. Thankfully, once I had flown out of the mountains and was back in the hustle and bustle of city life, it was that much easier for me to block out the memory of Thailand and the girl and what would await me in a few weeks time when I got back to South Africa.

  CHAPTER 7

  The first thing I wanted to do when I got home was to have the test done. I knew that the dark cloud hanging over me wouldn’t go away until I’d faced up to it. I narrowed down my options to two. One was for me to go to our family doctor and get tested there, and the second was for my mother to give me the HIV test herself. My mom had been working as a nurse for the past 20 years and so her doing the test herself was no big deal. In hindsight though, it was bloody crazy for me to even entertain the thought of asking my own mother to give me an HIV test. What was I thinking? I should have just taken myself off to see the doctor and done it that way. Yet one day, I found myself telling my mother in a cagey sort of way, that maybe I should have an HIV test to make sure that everything was okay. She didn’t ask any questions, but by the look on her face she must have known that I’d done something stupid overseas.

  “I’ll bring an HIV strip home from work tomorrow and we can do the test
then,” she said, with a concerned look on her face.

  Having had a few HIV tests done in the past, I knew the process all too well. I had to put a few drops of blood on the strip and then wait a few minutes for a line to appear. A line appearing on the one side indicated HIV positive, whereas a line on the other side of the strip indicated HIV negative. It was a terrifying few minutes for me as I sat on the couch waiting for the result to come through. For some strange reason, however, the strip didn’t give any result. No line appeared on either side. My mother didn’t let on that this could be a problem, and merely said that she was sure everything was fine.

  “Just to make sure,” she smiled, looking down at the strip in her hands, “let’s do another test tomorrow evening.” Little did I know that while I was fast asleep in my bed that evening my mom lay wide awake thinking the worst. She hardly slept a wink all night long.

  The next day when my mother got home from work, she marched through the front door and immediately pulled out the strip from her bag. This time we both sat on the couch waiting for the result to come through. She tried her best to hide her worry from me, but I could see straight through her. I knew how petrified she really was. The next few minutes passed by in silence, my mom lost in her own world of worry, and me sitting with my elbows on my knees and my face buried in my hands, too numb at this point to even pray. Only when I heard her walking over to the kitchen table, which is where she’d left the strip, did I look up. My mother immediately burst into tears when she saw that the result was negative. I quickly walked over to her and pulled her into my arms, hoping that this would make her feel better. To see her crying as she was, knowing that I was the direct cause of it, was like putting a knife through my heart. As horrible as it was, and as much as I wish I hadn’t done this to her, it finally hit me that I didn’t want to carry on like this anymore. Despite the fact that I had made the promise many times before that I would stop taking risks, I now vowed to myself that I wouldn’t put her in this position again. I had to stop being so reckless, otherwise one day my luck would run out. It was that simple!