Sick in Scotland
I remember exactly how I felt the moment I left work that late afternoon in October 2019. Luggage in hand, I schlepped down the streets of Downtown Providence, then traveled by train and shuttle bus to the Boston airport for my red-eye. All the while, my throat tickled unpleasantly. Despite the New England chill, I felt overdressed, my skin clammy. My eyes were inexplicably dry and tired.
They were telltale signs of a coming cold — maybe even a flu — but I was in willful denial. I can’t be sick, I told myself. I won’t allow myself to be sick. For god’s sake — I’m going to Scotland.
For someone who’s so obsessed with sun and warmth, I sure do have a strange preoccupation with Scotland. Perhaps that’s because it was the first place I ever visited outside the U.S. — my parents and I traveled there for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe when I was 9. Maybe it’s because I grew up listening to Celtic music and watching silly Scottish shows like “Monarch of the Glen.” Maybe it’s because my husband and I almost moved there back in 2015, when he was a finalist for a Ph.D. position in the Western Highlands.
Whatever the reason, I had been dying to revisit my first foreign destination for years. Finally, I had an excuse: Ian was traveling there for work and needed to stay a month. Though I knew he’d be busy during the day, I decided to tag along and make a weeklong fall vacation out of it.
I had big plans: A long weekend of hiking in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park; a day trip to Perthshire to see the fall colors and sample scotch; full days of museumgoing, sightseeing, biking and idle wandering in Edinburgh and Glasgow; full nights sampling restaurants and pubs with Ian. I planned not only to revisit all the sights that had captivated me as a kid but also to make it to sights I’d missed last time.
As you can probably guess by now…almost none of that happened.
By the time I landed at Heathrow early the next morning, the writing was on the wall. I had blocked sinuses, a slight fever, muscle fatigue, a dry cough. I groaned: There was still a full day of train travel ahead.
I arrived in Edinburgh that evening in a feverish daze. I stumbled a mile south toward Ian’s Airbnb, still just well enough to feel a heady thrill as I took in my surroundings. More than 20 years later, Edinburgh was still as gorgeous as ever, all Gothic spires and streets lined with soot-stained sandstone buildings. The sun was just setting as I emerged from the train station and gazed at the Balmoral Hotel’s clock tower.
I felt a panic rise as I crossed the touristy Royal Mile amid a crush of people — what is it about sickness that makes crowds so intolerable? But I pushed on and breathed a sigh of relief as the throngs thinned.
At the Airbnb, I mumbled pleasantries to the host as he acquainted me with the flat, and allowed myself to fall apart as he shut the door.
That evening, I took the only sensible action: I picked up the bare food necessities and a month’s supply of cold medicine at the corner store, drew a hot bath and went to sleep as early as possible.
Unfortunately, I’m pretty confident that what I did next would upset every medical professional in the world: I got up before dawn, downed a double dose of cold medicine, packed my bags, and set off for a long weekend of cold-weather hiking. (More on that later, but spoiler alert: It didn’t go so well.)
Now that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, it’s odd to look back on a time when I so cavalierly traveled abroad, jumped on public transit, walked down busy streets and interacted with others while I felt so poorly. After all, no one, whether ill or healthy, takes any of those activities lightly these days.
I’ll acknowledge that it may be strange — even angering — for you to read about someone willingly traveling abroad while sick and chronicling the experience with such a flippant tone. At the same time, I always aim to write as if in a travel journal, capturing all the things I was thinking and feeling at the time. And I have to admit that in pre-pandemic times, I did treat travel illnesses with flippancy. Many of us did.
By preserving my own 2019 perspective here, I hope to invite conversations and deep thoughts about the unhealthy ways in which some Western cultures view and cope with illness. I, and many others, have been conditioned not to rest in order to recover from a cold or a flu, but to instead return to work or school as quickly as possible and “push through.” I’ve reaped the consequences of this social pressure time and time again: What could have been week-long illnesses have often become prolonged fevers, pneumonia, months of whooping cough or asthmatic bronchitis.
I’ll step off my soapbox now. After all, you came here to read about Scotland!
I’ll soon be sharing more about my time at Loch Lomond and in Edinburgh — which, despite my condition, was pretty nice. Until then, I’ll leave you with a few pictures that I think encapsulate the beauty of this place: pastoral parks, moody gray days and imposing monuments and churches.
