Outbound

After being hospitalised with a rare and aggressive fever, it was time to make a drastic decision to leave Portugal.

Five days of living hell. That was what it felt like to be battling with a bacterial infection know as Mediterranean spotted fever, a disease transmitted by the bite of a tick. I hesitated with writing about this experience, because who wants to relive something so unpleasant? But the larger story would not be complete without it. To give context, it would be necessary to go back to the week before this catalytic event occurred.

It was a Sunday morning and I was running across the Serra with the dog. The route was one that we had ran many times before, a loop that circumnavigates a peak with no name, the local mountain that rises behind the farmhouse that I have been living in for a few months now. When I plan a run, I always aim for a loop in order to provide a sense of cartographic perfection — but this particular route comes not without risk. Before the final descent, there is a farmer who lives next to the gravel track who has a pack of particularly aggressive hunting dogs. He acts as if he owns the place and therefore feels no responsibility to contain them. I had met them a few times before, and found that as long as I kept my distance they tended to leave us alone.

This time, I saw the farmer far away in the distance and naively assumed that his dogs were with him, as they usually were. We ran past the farm slowly, to make sure of the position of the dog pack. In a moment that felt like lightning strike, the dogs came out of nowhere and charged towards Lupa. I pulled him back and threw myself in front of them. There were at least nine of them and only two of us. One of the dogs tried to bite him and a launched a punch at it, while two or three of the other dogs attacked me from multiple directions. We got out of there as quickly as possible, the farmer observing and indifferent to what was happening. Lupa was unscathed but I had a deep cut on the back of my leg, my muscle visibly showing and blood pouring down my leg. My shorts were ripped and a few other scratches and bites had been landed.

We ran home as quickly as possible and I cleaned the wound thoroughly. The next day I went to the police who were aware of the farmer and his aggressive dogs, and insisted that they would talk to him, but ultimately it was unlikely the change anything.

The week passed by and I went to Porto to see Kevin Morby perform live at the Hard Club, an artist who I’ve listened to consistently over the past two years, whose music became my internal soundtrack to many journeys across Europe. All seemed well and my leg was healing. A few days later, I noticed a small circular mark on my leg. It was unlike anything I had seen before and it hurt like hell. I had no idea what it was. My mind drifted back to the dog attack incident, but in the end it turned out to be completely unrelated. I had been bitten by a tick and hadn’t realised it.

I came down with a fever that Sunday. I put it down to a suppressed immune system and expected it to be cleared up within a day or two. By the fifth day, I realised something was seriously wrong. By the time I made it to the hospital it became almost impossible to stay upright, and I lay down in the hospital bed in extreme discomfort for four hours until I was seen by a doctor. The next few days were nothing short of hell — feeling completely disembodied as they took blood samples, performed a spinal tap with a heavy dose of morphine, and eventually diagnosed the illness as Mediterranean spotted fever. A bacterial infection caused by something known as Rickettsia, it is transmitted by ticks — of which there are many in the Portuguese countryside.

After receiving antibiotics, the fever began to clear up almost instantly. It was necessary to stay put so that the doctors could keep an eye on things. Being in that Portuguese hospital was something akin to being in a care home and a hospice for the old and nearly dead, but nonetheless I was grateful for the care and attention received by the doctors. The nurses on the other hand were a different story, often forgetting to replace the drips of the patients and on a specific incident, refusing to turn the bright fluorescent lights off until one in the morning for no apparent reason.

There is a specific kind of newfound clarity that emerges after six days of suffering with no means of escape. I remember being sat in the hospital bed with a certain kind of psychological discomfort, caused not by the illness but by my overall living situation. For months, I had been trying to find a better way of making my life work in Portugal — mostly in a financial sense, but also due to a chronic feeling of stagnation where it seemed as though nothing was really moving forward. Living there felt more like merely surviving or existing. There was enough to get by, but that feeling of barely scraping along began to build up into an intolerable feeling of being trapped. After weighing up the options, it became obvious that it was time to move on.

I began to feel like a human again and checked myself out after 3 nights. I couldn’t stand being confined in that putrid space. When I walked outside, the summer sunlight hit my retinas with a pure and cleansing brightness — a relief after the synthetic, sterilised interior of the hospital.

When a moment of realisation comes, there is the understanding that there is no returning to the previous state of awareness. The refusal of the call will only increase an underlying sense of agitation and unease, until it is simply too loud and intolerable to bear any longer. It was time to integrate everything that been learnt and seen in Portugal, and to acknowledge that it was not the final stop in the journey. It was time to go back home to the British Isles until the next step becomes clear.

A few weeks later, I was confronted with the challenge of fitting all of my most valued possessions inside my tiny, thirty-six year old car. I managed to fit the essentials after strapping my two bikes to a rear-mounted rack, leaving a few hours before sunrise in order to avoid the worst of the oncoming heatwave. Climbing above and into the high plateau above the Portuguese-Spanish border, I passed through misty clouds and headed east, as the pre-sunrise colours melted from midnight blue into indigo, tangerine and gold. It was the right decision, but it often only feels that way after the first step is taken.

I don’t know where I’m heading exactly, but all signs are pointing North.