I went on my Cancún trip with my friends last week. There was a huge amount of anxiety going into it - would one of us catch covid before, forget our passports, would my friend with the soon-expiring passport be denied entry, etc etc - but everything went smooth as silk. We had some food snafus - one night we were barely able to get dinner - and a particularly horrific experience one day while snorkeling. One friend got seasick, which soon bizarrely blossomed into a full-blown panic attack and collapse. The medics were called and put her on oxygen and she slowly recovered, but it was some time before she regained feeling in her limbs. It’s just fascinating - and scary - how our bodies handle panic. I’d never known her to have episodes like this; but interestingly just the night before we were chatting about bad dentist experiences and she mentioned a time when she panicked during a wisdom tooth extraction and started hyperventilating and lost feeling in her extremities and they had to bring in oxygen. The same thing happened on the boat. It made me grateful that, despite my long and tortured history with panic episodes, mine never end up in passing out and not feeling my hands or feet. A little throat closing doesn’t sound so bad, in retrospect.
The cruel finger of fate was not done with us, however. On our way home at a long layover at the Mexico City airport I suddenly started to feel nauseated, and right before we boarded the plane I vomited spectacularly in a garbage can in front of my (now wary) fellow passengers. Then was a torturous 4 1/2 hour flight back to freezing Los Angeles in which I felt like I was going to throw up every three seconds but didn’t. Apparently my body saved it for when I got home. Echoes of Fiji. I tested for covid as soon as I walked in the door and have been testing every day since - both me and my friends are still negative. They also never got sick. I’m now on day five of feeling like low-key garbage; I’m still, infuriatingly, nauseated, and not fully able to function. I’ve been dragging myself up to get kids to school and back and fed and put to bed, but otherwise I’m in bed feeling gross. Laundry isn’t done, showers haven’t been had, there’s no food in the house. It’s a mess.
Oh, and my period is late. Coincidence…? Ha ha, yes. Remember, husband was snipped years ago, and I am nearing 51. There is literally zero chance I could be pregnant, but just for entertainment purposes I allowed myself to think about the bizarreness of being thrown back into that world at my age, how much I’ve left the whole conception/birth/baby world behind me now. I don’t remember a lot about those days, certainly not things I’d need to know, like walking back days to see when I may have ovulated, what you do first when you find out you’re pregnant, when certain tests are…who remembers this stuff? This is all a decade away for me now. And the reality of a pregnancy at my age is actually quite dark; most likely scenario is it would just quietly go away in a few days; second, it would not-so-quietly go away and I’d have to get a D&C (yay California for protecting abortion rights), third, even if the pregnancy continued, the odds of having a healthy, viable baby would be almost nil, my life-long vegetarianism and abstention from alcohol be damned. So, there’s no happy endings here.
Most likely I got food poisoning, got a bacteria of some kind, contracted norovirus, and just have to work it out of my system. And the period? Put off by illness or travel or just a quirk of entering menopause. But it’s fun to fantasize sometimes, even if it’s about something you don’t actually want.
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