12th June, 2019
Camino Frances
Rabanal el Camino to El Acebo de San Miguel.
I spent about three hours very late last night and most of today mulling over if I should post about this day and if I did post what I should say. This day was perhaps the lowest point for me personally during my pilgrimage, for various reasons that will become more obvious as I tell the story of the 12th June, 2019.
I now know that I caught Legionella on the 4th or 5th of June, when I was in Sahagun. As in most Westernised countries, in Spain, Legionella is a notifiable disease and when a patient is admitted into hospital with it, every effort is made to find out where that person caught the disease so that they can attempt to eradicate the source. The Public Health Unit at Hospital Lucus Augusti in Lugo used my Pilgrim Credentials to backtrack each place where I stayed and eventually found (to their amazement because of the incubation time) that the Alberque Santa Cruz in Sahagun had the bacteria in its water supply and that another pilgrim who had also stayed there also became infected with Legionella within a similar timeframe.
As a side note, Santa Cruz have since then, replaced their ancient plumbing at some considerable cost and it is now completely safe to stay there again. Further more, if given the chance,
I would love to stay there again myself.
I will explain the symptoms of Legionella, as they are germane to the events of this day, the symptoms are:
rapid onset fever.
muscle aches.
tiredness.
headache.
loss of appetite.
breathlessness.
chest pain.
dry cough leading to pneumonia.
mental confusion.
According the the US CDC "
The incubation period for Legionnaires’ disease is most commonly 5 to 6 days from the time of exposure to symptom onset, with a range of 2 to 14 days, but public health officials have reported incubation periods up to 26 days under rare circumstances. For surveillance purposes, public health officials collect exposure histories for the 14 days before date of symptom onset."
If I assume that I caught Legionella on the 5th June then by the 12th I would have been exhibiting the common symptoms.
I am not sure if I had a fever, I did not have a thermometer and so I have no idea about that. I certainly had muscle aches but as the aches had come on gradually over the past seven days, I had ascribed the aches to not being very fit while walking the prior 450-500klms so nothing really noteworthy there and I was self medicating with Ibuprofen up to 2400mg a day.
Tiredness. Well, I am in my mid-sixties and walking 25-30klm a day, who wouldn't be tired under those circumstances? Headache. I have had headaches all my life, I just take paracetamol and get on with life. Loss of appetite. Well that is a bit more unusual for me but on its own it does not stand out as a significant indicator of a major problem.
Breathlessness. Yes, absolutely, especially going up hills I puffed like The Little Engine Who Could. Yesterday's comment about being passed by two young women as I walked the gentle incline up to Rabanal, where the women where striding past me, chatting together as if they were on a Sunday stroll while I was puffing, wheezing and struggling as they went past. However, on the downhill bits and usually on the flat I wasn't exhibiting any particular breathlessness and so I thought that my hill issues were simply ascribed to me not being fit enough. Chest pain. There was a certain tightness but given that I was frequently wheezing my way up the hills I simply thought that this was from my exertion.
Dry cough. Actually, I didn't have a cough or not one that I noticed.
Mental confusion. Well, you can judge for yourself from the following story.
The 12th was the day that I was climbing up to the Cruz de Ferro and I had scripted this day in my mind from the moment that I decided to walk the
Camino Frances. Today was the day that I would get to say goodbye to my deceased friend, B.
Before I left ANZ I asked B's wife, N, if she would be prepared to give me something personal of his that I could leave at the Cruz de Ferro in Spain. I said to her that while I wanted something personal, it should be something of little intrinsic value, perhaps a comb or a toothbrush, as I intended to leave it out in the open in a public place visited by thousands of people every year.
I had lunch with N at the airport before I flew out and she bought two items of B's along with her as a gift for me. One was one of B's hats. N knows me well (after around 45 years of friendship, almost as long as I had been friends with B) and knew that I often wore a hat and so with B's hat on my head I had a daily reminder of him. The other item was one of B's rings. It wasn't a jewellery ring, it was a simple, unadorned copper ring that B wore because he thought that it reduced the pain of arthritis in his hands. I don't know if it actually made any difference to the arthritis but B did think that it did and he had worn the ring for over 25 years and so over that time it had absorbed a bit of his essence or life force.
I was a little surprised that N was giving me the ring and I reminded her that I intended to leave it on a pile of rocks in Spain and asked if she was okay with that? One of the really nice things about N is that she is really straightforward. She assured me that she was completely okay with me leaving the ring at the Cruz de Ferro.
So, back to the Camino. When I woke up on the morning of the 12th I felt in reasonably condition. I had a few aches but then who my age doesn't? I knew that today would be a very emotional day for me and so I purposely avoided my Irish friends from the night before and set off for the Cruz de Ferro alone. Along the way I managed to get these shots departing Rabanal, of local wildlife and on the climb up the hill.
Of course, I struggled up the hill, puffing as I went but eventually crested a hill and saw the Cruz de Ferro ahead of me. As I got closer I was pleased to see that there weren't too many other people around and there was only a single couple up on the rocks around the cross and so I waited respectfully for them to finish before I went up to say my goodbye to B.
I was just about to go up to the cross myself when a middle-aged Spanish guy ran past me and up to the cross, started swinging on it and called out loudly to a taxi driver in the nearby car park asking him to take his picture dancing around the cross. The taxi driver seemed to be cringing somewhat at his antics but eventually got his phone out and took a photo of the guy.
I was flabbergast and angry that my carefully self-scripted ceremony was being usurped by this guy but at the same time I partially caught myself and acknowledged to myself that there were no "rules" and that if this guy wanted to celebrate being at the Cruz de Ferro in this way then it was not for me to judge him. I thought that I would just wait until he was finished and then proceed with my plans.
At that moment I saw two tour busses pull into the carpark and my heart really sank because I knew that this meant that in a few moments time, hoards of people would come out of those busses and they would naturally come over to the cross and do their own thing before the busses departed for the next stop on their tour.
I had only moments to decide if I would wait for the loud guy and the bus passengers to leave, risking have yet more busses arrive in the meantime or throw my carefully self-scripted ceremony out and do something quick and dirty before being surrounded my bus passengers. I decided to do something quick and get out of there before my anger with the world boiled over.
I walked quickly up to the cross, crossing paths with another couple who seemed to have the same idea, touched the cross, walked back down, turned my back to the cross, said a quick goodbye to B and his deceased son (another story for another day), chucked the ring over my shoulder, turned and took this photo, then stormed off.
*** There is a character limit on these posts and so I will end this post here and restart in the next one.
and now I can say that I have slept in a nunnery!
- so I got a personal tour 
. 
There were moments.
. Like most things in life there were a combination of things that were part of my decision process.
