The ecosystem within

After Mt St Helens and Rainier, I'm dry docked in Olympia with what is likely the result of drinking untreated water. I think it was Euell Gibbons who had written that he never bothered to treat backcountry water since it was man and not nature that made things impure. I figured to follow the same advice - the Indians didn't get giardia, afterall - and drank deeply and fully from glacial melt streams, springs, and rain fed rills. Always treat backcountry sources I had been told, but why if, as Euell said, there was no industry or settlement to fear? I wasn't going to get cholera, unless some particularly bad-off climber had expired on the snowpack and rotted down. I was more worried about stubbing toes or getting bitten by a mouse. 

Now three days into stomach pains and nausea I'm thinking over which source, if any, was the culprit. Of them all - and there have been many since I started walking in May - the most likely are the most recent. Single-celled intestinal parasites typically have an incubation period of a week. Though in some cases cysts have lain dormant for months or even years in their hosts.

For those most celebrated single cell invaders - amoebic dyssentery, giardia - the commonly prescribed treatment in the US is several weeks of a powerful antibiotic typically given to patients in the advanced stages of syphilis. That is to say that it cleans out anything nonhuman in you, such as all those helpful bacteria in your small intestine that enable you to properly digest your food, have regular bowel movements, and fart. Patients during treatment typically get diarhea, in addition to intense stomach cramps, and loss of appetite, though no longer from the microorganism but the medications. Though presently I do have  what some would call a crook stomach and I'm not very hungry and have had to use a bathroom with rather greater frequency and rather less enthusiasm than I should like, the symptoms I have at present aren't nearly as bad as the cure. And in retrospect, not very different from other post-backcountry excursion states of being. I had plenty of pains when I worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club and hiking in California and in Europe. And a fair number of people recover from such infections without medical intervention, typically in a week to two weeks. 

But what's really fascinating is that when the little guys now colonizing a fresh digestive system feel like they're ready for a break, they just burrow into the intestinal lining and encyst themselves into dormancy. Which means that during their hibernation, you can feel perfectly healthy, indeed, BE healthy, while they sleep. Then, when they feel it is right, months or even years later, they reactivate. So if I've had waterborne sickness in the past and gotten over it, it either means I've got a good enough gut to kill those suckers after a few days, or, the buggers never left and like unwelcome relations like to drop in every now and again, typically after vacations. 

I salute that kind of tenacity. But whatever is in me I still want gone. Turns out garlic is a fairly potent medecine against intestinal infection. And as my gut has encountered it before, there shouldn't be any hellish cramps or rectal fauceting brought on my this treatment. I have so far eaten four cloves today, and won't sleep till I've had four more. I'm going to be eating garlic like popcorn for the next week. 

And tomorrow, I'm going to a doctor. 

And then I'm going to climb Mt Olympus.