ADVrider.com
When Polly Garter says, “Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?” she has it pinned. Life is a terrible thing; it is infinitely complicated and interlinked and whatnot else. When you’re living one of those so-called “normal” lives you can easily forget that. But step outside that normality some time, even a little bit, and the terrible part of the thing comes to get you. Thank God it—mostly—leaves you alive, but I’m here to tell you it can hurt.
All right, I was probably not in either life-threatening medical or existential danger when my travel companion Charlie and I rolled into the Sri Hualamphong Hotel near the main railway station in Bangkok. And I mean “rolled” literally; we had been invited by the desk clerk to bring our bikes inside and park them in the lobby, which doubled as a restaurant—and now a motorcycle garage. That wasn’t uncommon in Asia in 1978, of course.
Hey little fella, watch out for sunstroke! But you probably know about it. Photo: The Bear
So no, I just had a headache. But it was a wonder of a headache, a headache you could have painted a picture of, one that made the contents of my entire skull feel as if they were bathed in acid. Any movement added to the agony, as did bright lights—hell, any lights. Anything above total darkness, which could not be achieved by simply closing my eyes but required me to pull some opaque material over my head as well.
There was also—skip this paragraph if you’re squeamish—a peculiarly vile urge to vomit, which when acted upon resulted only in a dribble of thin, acidic fluid which for all I knew might have been some of the stuff filling my skull. Along with that came watery diarrhea and muscular pain and a general malaise which left me without any ambition other than to drink some water, lie down and die. Not necessarily in that order, but after going to the toilet.
The desk clerk gave me a room key before we had even checked in, and I headed upstairs to our room with a bottle of water. I lay on the bed in a kind of timeless, pain-filled swoon broken only by dry heaving, cups of tea brought by Charlie and visits to the toilet. After more than two days I managed to rouse myself sufficiently to ooze downstairs to the restaurant where I sat… just sat.
Having learned my lesson, I wore my helmet and a neck cover even in the rainforest. Photo: The Bear
A bloke at the next table asked if I was all right, and I described my time in purgatory. After all, you want to get something out of such an experience, even if it’s just moaning about it to a bloke in a cheap hotel in Bangkok.
“Ah,” he said, “you’ve had sunstroke.” But I’d been religiously wearing my helmet after our crash in Malaysia a few weeks before. How could I have gotten sunstroke? “Were you wearing what you’ve got on now?” he asked. “Your T-shirt has a pretty low neck at the back. That’s all it takes. Your brain doesn’t need to be exposed if your spine is.” He then explained about cerebrospinal fluid.
Here’s a quick quote from medlineplus.gov. “Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a clear, colourless, watery fluid that flows in and around your brain and spinal cord. Your brain and spinal cord make up your central nervous system. It controls and coordinates everything you do, including your ability to move, breathe, see, think, and more.”
And if you heat this stuff sufficiently, you get sunstroke. Terrible sunstroke.
I mulled this over, as much as I could in my state. Ability to move affected? Check. Breath? Well, not so much except for a sore ribcage. Vision? Oh yeah. I was still getting stabbing pains from any bright flashes in the muddy panorama of the Sri’s lobby that my eyes were presenting to me. Think? Um, well, yeah. You bet, I guess. And more? Well, there was that urge to throw up, and a complete inability to keep down—or even to get down—anything resembling solid food. And… but you get the idea.
My landlady’s son in Pokhara, Nepal, thought the helmet was the best thing ever. Photo: The Bear
My newly acquired medical adviser, who turned out to be a med student on holidays, asked what I’d been doing to treat my affliction. Nothing, I said. Lying in a dark room. More effective treatment, he said, would have been to immerse my suffering corpus in cold water or pack me in ice, but the Sri Hualamphong didn’t stretch to those kinds of luxuries.
“You probably did the best you could,” he conceded. “Except for drinking tea. You would have been better off with plain water. But then again, this is Thailand. You were probably better off with tea, at least the water has been boiled. Anyway, I’d say you’ll be fine in another couple of days.”
And indeed I was, and I made very sure from then on that my neck was covered. Thank God.
The post Watch Your Spine To… Avoid Sunstroke? appeared first on Adventure Rider.
