1. Poisoning my entire family with undercooked chicken hotdogs
We were on our third day in Costa Rica, and Danny went to get groceries with our 6yo. For some unknown stupid reason, they decided to buy chicken hotdogs for dinner. Have I ever HAD chicken hotdogs? No. Have we ever BOUGHT chicken hotdogs? Also no. Have I ever COOKED chicken hotdogs? Absolutely the heck not.
So anyway, 3 hours after dinner I start feeling a little queasy but I brush it off as anxiety. At 2am Danny moves to the bathroom and parks there for the night.
The next 5 days were probably the worst food poisoning my entire family has ever had, and the fun part was we took turns going down, one person at a time, because why save time and just get it over with when you can prolong the suffering for as much as possible?
2. Thinking I got that crazy brain-eating amoeba
Remember the food poisoning story from #1?
Well in between pockets of feeling good during those 5 days, we tried to squeeze some of the stuff we had booked. We went to do our Wakesurfing activity that we had signed up for in Lake Arenal. Mind you, this was on day 4 of food poisoning, where most of my family has already *expelled* all the poison from their bodies, and I was doing mostly ok the entire time and thought I had largely avoided it barring some nausea.
Wakesurfing went super well, Danny and I were both able to get up and surf and were having a blast. I got a stupendous amount of water forcefully shoved up my nose, as you do, when you fall into the water. My sinuses were still aching for hours after from the force!
For some idiotic reason, I decide to google the symptoms for brain eating amoeba because we had been discussing it earlier as it is found in hotsprings (which we had been very careful not put our heads underwater there). I then read that it’s not *only* found in hotsprings, but also freshwater lakes, especially warmer ones in the tropics. Like Lake Arenal. And in fact – it’s just safe to assume that the amoeba exists there ALL the time, and to absolutely never get water forcefully shoved up your nose. And the symptoms are vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and stiff neck.
So of course, within 24 hours of getting a sh*tload of Arenal freshwater up my nose, I start vomiting, diarrhea, fever, chills.
I have never panicked so hard in my life.
I spent the entire night running to the bathroom – I’ll spare you the details. But the next morning, Danny asks me how I’m feeling. I say I’m feeling really weak, my resting heart rate is 150, and my neck is really stiff.
Mind you – Danny has been completely lax about my amoeba concerns and laughing it off, saying it’s SO RARE that there’s absolutely no way. But the moment I mention the stiff neck (on top of vomiting, fever, chills, diarrhea) his entire face just dropped. Which sent me into another panic spiral.
Obviously since I’m writing this now, you can assume everything ended up ok. But I could never describe the amount of panic I felt in that moment. Thankfully my body was just still working on expelling all the toxins from #1 – it was just 5 days delayed.
3. Getting Covid in Faroe Islands and looking for help in a deserted hospital
We must’ve gotten this on the flight to Faroe Islands since we only had 2 days to enjoy the place before all of us went down. If you’re not familiar with Faroe Islands – it’s quite remote and there’s really only one good hospital on the entire island – the one in Tórshavn. We were of course staying – not there – when my 8mo suddenly came down with a really high fever without any other symptoms. She was very lethargic and also having a really hard time breathing and I started getting pretty worried about that. It was 10pm, the closest hospital was an hour away and I wasn’t sure what to do.
So I did what any normal person would, and walked over to the tiny little “hospital” in the tiny little town we were staying at (Klaksvík, an absolutely beautiful little village!). This town was so tiny that the hospital was sharing a building with the tourist information center. The entire building was completely deserted. Lights turns on as I walked the hallways, without another soul in sight.
After walking the entire building (and the tourist info center!) I finally found the emergency check in counter which was completely empty. I knocked, I rang the little desk bell, and no one showed up. I spent some more time walking the hallways and after probably 30 minutes, someone walked out of a room who looked like a doctor.
I was so excited to finally see another human! And what luck – it was a doctor! He asked if I needed help and I asked him if they would see children here, specifically under 1yo. He said no, and that I would need to go to Torshaven for pediatric care, but asked what I needed help with. I showed him a video of my baby breathing and asked him if it sounded concerning. He watched it, said she’s probably ok to wait until morning and handed me some tylenol.
That was my interaction – diagnosed in the dark hallway through a video, no nurses, not a single other soul in sight, gave me meds, and sent me on my way.
We ended up driving to Torshaven the next morning to be closer to the hospital in case things took a turn to the worst, and got covid tests which at least gave us some answers.
4. Completely missing cherry blossoms in Japan
We spent a full month exploring Japan – Starting in Kyushu and making it all the way back to Tokyo in hopes of tracking the cherry blossoms throughout our trip. I booked everything based on the forecast and figured we would shift things by a few days here and there to make sure we made it for peak.
Little did we know, this would be the first time in over a decade where the blossoms will be late by a full HALF MONTH, which meant we missed them almost entirely throughout our drive!
The nice thing is Japan is still an amazing place to explore with cherry blossoms or without, but it was definitely a bummer to miss it to completely.