Caching and Crashing

I went on a hike with a person who didn't understand my limitations and it didn't go great.

I should have never said yes, but for a complicated set of reasons, I did. It was gearing up to be another scorcher when I got her text, did I want to go check out a geocache within 1/2 mile of home? I decided yes, with the stipulation that it would have to be quick, because the day would be hot.

We headed out, never found the cache and the hike went much, much longer than I expected. I started to feel ill and requested that my hiking buddy call a ride. She joked with me that we would make it, and didn't. I asked again, a little later. She encouraged me to keep going and called me a trooper, and again, didn't make the call. To her credit, we were stopping every few minutes to rest, drinking lots of water, and moving at a slow to moderate pace, but when I said I needed a ride, she really should have made the call. The first time.

So, we got to some other cache that I was way too sick to care about and my vision started going wonky, so I sat down, refused to get back up and I asked her again to call my boyfriend. She walked away with her phone and I heard her asking him to come and get me, without telling him I was sick. I suspect that omission was out of some kind of guilt. He didn't ask for details either, since he already knows what this phone call means, and they hung up quickly, after determining our location.

While she was talking, I made mental notes of what was happening with my vision, being ever the migraine blogger. Looking down at my lap and the wooden bench under me, the textures seem to swirl together, pulsing and moving of their own accord. The field of grass and path further away seemed to ebb and flow like waves at the beach, and when I closed my eyes, I could see stars flowing into a center. Unfortunately, closing my eyes made my nausea flare high, so I couldn't enjoy that show too long.

Finally, my boyfriend found us, we made it home, and I actually recuperated faster than I expected, but not without experiencing severe nausea, dizziness, mild head pain, confusion, and those truly frightening visual effects.

I learned my lesson that day. I won't be going anywhere alone with that person again, she has proven herself untrustworthy and insensitive to my illness. Being chronically ill makes it so easy to weed out people, sometimes I'm really grateful to have this perspective. The migraines, no, but the deeper understanding of people and their capacity for sympathy and cruelty has been a fascinating lesson.