Day 210

Dried yak poo, paraffin, and a rusty iron stove. Our host lifts the lid and uses a torch to check the stove’s contents, while a flaming branch is carried into the tea room. Our host is a young Nepali woman with a pale complexion, long dark hair, and a sturdy demeanour, she looks tough and no doubt you need to be, living 5 kilometres into the sky. She opens the ash pan and throws in a few yak droppings, pours paraffin over them, and carefully navigates the flaming branch inside. The flames roar upwards, the swaying radiance illuminates the tea room wonderfully, then a ginormous metal kettle is brought out and placed on top of the stove. 

Heat begins to dull my eyes and returns sensation to my chilly fingertips. We are very tired this evening and my heart is putting up a fierce battle as it pushes a diminished supply of oxygen around my body. 

Across the tea room, two Welsh gentlemen sit and play cards with their tour guide. They will also attempt to reach the Everest Base Camp tomorrow. One of the Welsh gents has a quick and expressive face, bright ginger hair and deep shadowy eyes. He once severed the tendons in his left shoulder and after surgery and a divorce is now a keen triathlete. The other Welsh gent gravitates towards the warming stove, he is of Indian descent and uses a cute purple bobble hat complete with a woolly pompom to protect his perfectly smooth bold head. He explains that the only luxury he brought with him was his head shaver. He is a keen mountaineer who moves slowly and carefully because of a limp and currently awaits an operation to repair his damaged right knee.

I get out my blood testing kit and prick my finger.

“You have diabetes?” The woolly hat Welsh gent asks. 

“Yes, for over twenty years,” I say while inspecting my monitor; 11.7.

He goes on and tells me about his wife, a diabetic from the years 1970 to 2010, and explains how she self-managed and how it dramatically affected her moods. Something Wiggy and myself are very aware of.  

“I have to say, well done. Well done for doing what you’re doing and not letting the disease stop you,” he says. He has a beautiful and kind face, I smile and feel a great gratitude towards him, yet as he speaks I notice his eyes glimmer in the firelight. He looks away, and I can feel the wave of love and loss consuming him.

Our guest house is in Gorak Shep. A small settlement of several guest houses that miraculously appear after a strenuous struggle through switchbacks and slopes, which transcend the remains of various ragged avalanche falls. Since getting settled here we’ve both developed headaches, which have got gradually worse. When I move my head too quickly, the whiplash scar in my neck twinges and a wringing pain shoots up to my head. We decide it’s time for action and for the first time, we pull out our Diamax pills (for altitude sickness) and take half a pill each. We’ve been told that you need to drink a lot of water with these, so we do, around an additional 750ml before bed. 

We go to bed early, maybe 19:30 pm, and even after resting in bed for 2 hours my heart still sounds like a racehorse galloping. With earplugs in, the thump of the blood moving through my veins is magnified in my eardrums, and in the corridor outside, footsteps pass; heavy, carrying, reverberating, like my heart. There is little insulation in the walls of this guest house and the wooden floorboards are naked, so sound and heat easily transcend through crack and crevice.

In the night it plummets to -20 outside and drops to around -15 in our room. Our water bladder freezes, our thermal canisters freeze, our wet wipes freeze, and our breath freezes and clings to our sheets in icy particles, even the alcohol hand sanitiser outside the toilet has frozen. I’m wrapped up in my thermal jumper, leggings, socks and woolly hat. And I’ve wrapped up my phone and insulin and placed them in my thermal liner, under the guest house duvet. Earlier, we heard a disgruntled guest complaining about his power bank, which had frozen in his room. Hearing this I’d taken to wrapping all of our electronics in items of clothing in the hope that this might improve their chances.

The cold night was a little challenging but the biggest challenge was the Diamax pills! Throughout the night Wiggy needed to visit the loo to urinate 8 times and for me, it was 7. The worst thing was that the toilet outside our room was locked, apparently frozen, so we had to pass through two shady corridors and down a flight of stairs, stumble to the end of a chilly corridor and squeeze into a small cubicle, complete with squat loo, frozen urine on the floor, and a frozen bucket of water to flush away your waste. Unfortunately, the excrement in the squat loo was also frozen, however, our copious wee visits did unblock it a bit throughout the night. And by the morning, at least our headaches had gone.

Midday arrives before we feel rested enough to attempt the hike to EBC. At 5364m altitude, it feels like the supply of oxygen in the air has halved. My heart fires at an astronomical rate and with every rise a plug has been pulled and my muscles are starved and do not want to move. The wind through the pass is brutal and freezing cold, it pushes into my face and makes me light-headed. Yet the scenery is so spectacular that with every rest stop, I feel the need to pull off my thick winter gloves and record what I’m seeing. We are up there with the giants, we’ve climbed so high now that mountain peaks cocoon us from above and glacier ice envelopes us from below. Yet concernedly the glacier ice looks sparse and from the glimpse of Everest we can see, barely any snow resides on her head.

Despite the harshness, I find today much easier than yesterday’s trek. The terrain is less challenging and along with the climbs we also encounter several sloping downhill sections. Additionally, as we are returning to our Gorek Shep accommodation, we do not need to carry our full trekking packs. This is great, Wiggy has filled his backpack with water, snacks and our jackets, so I’m free to roam with no load. I move quickly and have enough energy to skip over boulders to pass slower-moving tour groups. Even still, my body is suffering. 

For over 5 hours my blood sugar has not dropped below 20 and has peaked at 27! This is despite me injecting a great deal of additional insulin. For reference, a blood sugar of 27 means that my blood is thick with over five times the amount of glucose that it is designed to carry. My Freestyle Libra graph looks like Mount Everest, with her tall climbs and double peaks. The altitude is doing strange and unpredictable things to my body, today I need to inject triple my normal dose of insulin, but yesterday a thousand meters down, I needed to inject half, why? 

There is not much information available that documents what happens to a diabetic’s body at high altitude, however, I believe it is a similar thing that happens to our bodies when we are ill. The liver responds and secretes glucose to fuel the body as it fights the illness. This is handy in a non-diabetic body as they can utilise the additional glucose; their pancreas secretes insulin, which breaks down the glucose and turns it into energy to feed the muscles. But a diabetic cannot do this, the glucose instead builds up in their blow flood and will remain there until insulin is injected. 

Despite leaving late and being ill, we make good progress. 2 hours to reach EBC, 1 hour exploring the camp, which included walking to the glacier ice and queuing for photos on the big Base Camp rock. We watch groups posing with flags from their home countries and watch a group of people attempting to do handstands against the rock. There is great camaraderie, many people cheer, high five and congratulate each other. But sadly, not everyone can join in. Altitude affects all of us differently, and it is clear that some people have pushed themselves to reach this place beyond the bounds of safety. 

We’ve seen a few people making this journey who have been unable to walk, however, for a fee of $200, a horse can be hired. We’ve passed a few of these ponies, carrying faint-looking individuals to the camp. But a hundred meters from the EBC rock, the horses cannot continue due to the ruggedness of the terrain. We see one lady being carried by her porter, she is laid down on the campground and lies unmoving as she regains her strength. Summit fever is a phenomenon that has claimed many lives, even at the lowest camp.

Before we head back, I want to complete a mission for a dear friend. From Kathmandu, I have carried some prayer flags, and close the big EBC rock, a gathering of a few hundred other prayer flags are tied down by a cluster of rocks and boulders. They flap and wriggle in the wind, and slowly grow dim under the mountain sunshine. I set about finding a suitable residence for my flags. I secure them, watch them drift in the breeze, absorb the scene, and say a few heartfelt words for my friend who recently passed away after a short and unexpected illness.

“This is a remembrance for Paul Hayden, the Guvnor of LMRC, you are loved and missed.”