Pilot's Nightmare

Getting sick on the road is just plain bad.  Worse yet is getting sick on the road in a foreign country. 

I awoke yesterday with a dull headache and abdominal pains.  I new I was in for it because our flight attendent developed similar symptoms the day before.  I didn't feel awful just not right.  As the day progressed I became more and more sypmptomatic with headache and fatigue.  The city we were in had tremendous pollution and it was raining.  In those conditions it is more like "mudding" than raining.  I began to wonder if it was the atmospheric conditions causing it but probably not.  

I went to dinner with the crew and then excused myself because I needed to get some relief from the headache and fatigue.  I went to my room and laid down.  It was 5pm.  The next thing I knew the clock read "1200 am".  I got up sent some email then collapsed again until 6am!  Still feeling poorly but much improved from the day before I went down for breakfast where I learned our third pilot on the crew had also been felled by this thing.  He would not be available to fly.  When I saw him I could see that he had an even worse case than I did.  

As a side bar, I gotta tell you that this China thing gets really old.  Finding a smoke free zone can be really difficult at times.  Restaurants, non-smoking hotel rooms, hotel lobbys, elevators are all frequently smoked up.  Industrial towns like the one were in have smog so think you could cut it with a knife.  You should see the mess the mudding made out of our jet!  Streaks of dirt are running down the sides where rain fell then dragged mud down the side of the fuselage.  Nasty, nasty, nasty.  The pollution thing is so bad here and it doesn't seem like there is any plan to fix it.  More cars are going to be on the roads not less.  They are building more refineries to produce more gasoline which will produce more pollution.  

Last night we landed in the next town and rode to the hotel.  I had a dull headache that was very tolerable.  Well, that changed as the evening progressed.  I met the crew for dinner and by the time that was over I had what can only be termed a migraine-like headache.  Just being awake was terrible.  I crashed at around 9pm but was in and out of sleep because my head was bumpin' so much.  At around 3am I took Ibuprofin and awoke at 6am headache free!!  As I write I feel almost normal.