An Absolutely Broken Body: Colombia Week 7 & Florida 2019
- Kjerstin Roberts
- Apr 21, 2020
- 17 min read
Updated: May 11, 2020
This week was an absolute whirlwind of activity. I spent the first half of the week in Bogota learning the differences in culture between mainland and coastal Colombia. Fun fact: Colombians speak more than 21 dialects of Spanish, so your Spanish can sound really good or really bad depending on which group of people you are talking to. Mostly I was just so excited to see an entirely new part of Colombia with a super different culture. Also, a TON of stuff happened this week, so this post will be quite long.
*Warning: This post will contain some medical images and some content that may seem graphic to some viewers.*
Day 1
I flew to Bogota in the morning. My flight was originally supposed to leave at 8am, but we didn't end up leaving until around 10am. One thing about flights in South America is their time flexibility. In the US, flights run right on time or there is some sort of uproar and people complain. In South America, no one starts to ask questions until things are running like 3 hours late. Totally different piece of the culture.
After arriving an hour and a half later in Bogota, I took a taxi to the center of the city. On the ride there, the taxi driver told me I spoke really good Spanish, which was such a compliment to me because a few days before that, my host brother Cristhian had told me I spoke terrible Spanish. However, the dialect change made it seem like I spoke Spanish really well, so I was very pleased.
In the center of the city, I made my way to El Museo del Oro (the museum of gold). Bogota has one of the largest collections of gold in the world, so I decided to go check it out. The museum was absolutely PACKED full of people, but it was quite interesting to read a bit about the gold and the culture of the ancestors. I really loved it. I also ate one of the most delicious pieces of chocolate cake in my life there at the gift shop. I'm not normally a chocolate cake fan, but this stuff was next level. Seriously so so yummy!
After El Museo del Oro, I decided to walk around the city for a while. One of my favorite things to do in a new city is to take a walking tour alone and just see what the city has to offer. Bogota was absolutely beautiful. It had the classic architecture seen in Cartagena, beautiful mountains, and a colder yet still humid climate. It reminded me a lot of the coastal mountains of Oregon and Washington. I loved it.
I ended up eating lunch at Subway of all places before watching some street performers and heading to several large plazas. The buildings there were so beautiful. Eventually, I decided I should probably head to the store. When I take trips, I usually buy as many toiletries as possible in the country as I love to travel with only a carry on. I went to a store for some small bottles of shampoo and a bit of food to eat for the next three days. Making food is always much cheaper than buying it, so I usually try to make my own food as much as possible.
When I walked out of the store, I was just in time to be caught in a rainstorm. I caught a taxi and headed to my Airbnb. My taxi driver was quite creepy, so I had him drop me at a mall close to my Airbnb. I explored the mall for a bit. Foreign shopping habits always interest me for some odd reason. I always like to see their set up, food courts, and types of stores. I hate shopping in the US but enjoy people watching at malls in foreign countries. What can I say... I'm an odd duck.
After spending some time at the mall, I walked to my Airbnb. However, the owner had not left instructions for how to get into the gated compound and did not answer his phone when I called over and over and over again. After more than an hour and close to tears, I called off my beautiful Airbnb and headed to a $6 hostel. Luckily, this was nearby and served breakfast. It wasn't the most beautiful hostel I have ever seen, but it was functional and had some fun people.
At the hostel, I made friends with a man from Mexico and a girl from a city about three hours from Bogota by bus. We chatted for hours and eventually ran across the street to get some cookies right before the bakery closed.
Day 2
I slept really poorly that night. I kept getting too hot and waking up. At one point, I was up for an entire hour before being able to fall back asleep. I now know this was probably when I was in the throes of a fever, but at the time, I just thought the hostel had really poor air circulation. I was planning to sleep in late, but one of my new friends woke me up at 8:30am for breakfast. Normally I would say that isn't super early, but it felt really early for me since I was up all night.
After I was up, I decided to go to La Catedral de Sal (the salt cathedral). This catedral was made out of an old salt mine and is the second largest one in the world. The pictures looked incredible. To get there, you had to taxi to a bus station out of the city and then purchase a ticket to this random city that was farther than your destination. You kind of were supposed to just know where to get off. The bus was also super sketchy itself and felt like it was about to fall apart. I've attached a video so you can see a little of the central Colombian countryside.
Eventually, I asked the bus driver to tell me where I needed to get off. I ended up getting off at the same time as two men from Spain. Both were named Javier and they were best friends. We decided to go up to the catedral together. We ended up spending the entire day together.
We eventually were able to navigate our way up to the catedral. Honestly, there were no directions, so it was a bit difficult. When we finally made it there, we were offered complimentary headsets with a tour. We each took one in our native language.
La Catedral de Sal is 570 feet underground and contains 14 different crosses. One of these is the largest underground cross in the world at 52 feet high. It's made completely out of salt, which blew my mind a little bit. La catedral also contains three massive meeting chambers and was absolutely stunning on the inside. Everything was lit up in blue light. There were also tons of murals everywhere. The most shocking thing is that it is so far underground and everything is made of salt. It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I really enjoyed having my handheld device with me so I could hear all the amazing tour guides and facts. I know Javier and Javier really enjoyed being able to listen to everything as well. I listened in English while they chose the Spanish version. They also had several other European languages, which probably contained the languages most commonly spoken at la catedral.
When we were finally ready to leave la catedral, we exited through several gift shops and dropped our headsets off. Javi, Javi, and I decided to grab some food and explore a little bit more of Zipaquira, the city we were currently in. We ended up getting fried chicken for lunch. I love how much Colombians love fried chicken. It honestly makes me so happy. They would always ask me about fried chicken in the States, and I never had a great answer for them as I'm from the Midwest.
We walked around for an hour or two before deciding to head home. To get home, you had to locate the bus stop where you had been dropped off and catch a bus that was headed back towards Bogota. Luckily, we were able to find our bus stop pretty easily and boarded a bus. Unfortunately, the bus was mostly full, so we ended up having to stand for nearly the entire hour long bus ride back to the city. We also each had to locate our own stops. Hot travel tip: always make a pin in your phone of your address so you can find your hostel even if your data is off. Because of this, I was able to track when the bus got close to my hostel and then get off at that stop.
Before we move on, I have to note that the Instagram caption I used for the picture of me was something along the lines of how all the infections I had had not killed me yet. This is quite ironic, because immediately after arriving back at my hostel, I freaked my mom out really badly with news that my infections were getting much worse and that I could no longer bend my elbow. She demanded that I send pictures of my elbow so she could send them to her brother Sam, who is an emergency room doctor. As an ER doc, Sam has pretty much seen it all, so my mom knew that he would be able to help or maybe help diagnose what I had. She also wanted pictures of each of my infections, but I won't attach those here because some of them are quite gross.
I spent the afternoon freaking my mom out about not being able to move my elbow really at all. I also had a lump of something in the opposite armpit as well as continually worsening infections.12/10 would not recommend.
I wanted to go to bed early but ended up having to stay up early with my "friend" from Colombia who wanted to cry over a lost friendship. The song "Criminal" by Ozuna will forever remind me of her because she listened to that song over and over again while complaining about one of her best friends not talking to her anymore. It was a lot for someone who was not feeling great. I finally told her I had to go to bed around 11, which was much later than I was anticipating.
Day 3
I started off the day well by sending my mom this video when I got up at 7:45. Because of the time difference, she didn't see it for a while. By the time she had received a response from her brother Sam, I had already left the house and had no way to talk to her. When I travel internationally, I always turn my phone to airplane mode for the duration of the trip because I do not want to incur international cell phone charges for no reason.
After leaving the hostel with all my stuff so I could go to the airport later, I went to the Bogota Temple. This temple is for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to perform ordinances in, including weddings. The baptistry hours were supposedly 7am-12pm, but when I got there at 10:45am, they said they were not doing any more baptisms until 4pm. Because of this, I just sat on the lawn for an hour before walking across the street to go to McDonalds and use their wifi.
Unfortunately, the wifi at McDonalds was down. I ended up sitting there for 4.5 hours and reading a book on my phone because I could not get the wifi to work. I kept ordering smoothies and treats from the McCafe (delicious in Colombia) because I felt guilty for being there for so long. By the time it was nearly 4pm and I could head back to the temple, I felt so gross and exhausted that I decided the better move would be to head straight to the airport to return back to Cartagena. I sat at the airport for over 4 hours because I was too tired to do anything else.
Being at the airport ended up being a blessing in disguise. When I arrived and went through customs, I went to the bathroom. Normally, I will save the handicapped bathroom for someone who really needs it, but today I decided to take it. It turned out to be a really good thing too because I noticed blood from my armpit seeping through my shirt in the mirror in the handicapped stall. There was tons of infection inside and I spent almost twenty minutes squeezing the infection out of my own wound in my armpit while watching myself in the mirror because it was a spot I could not see in my own armpit. Good times.
After the bathroom experience, I washed my hands thoroughly before sitting down and calling my mom. The Bogota airport had 30 minutes of free wifi, and I used all 30 of them calling her. I was literally crying on the phone to her. I normally never cry, so this was a shocking experience for me. I can't remember the last time I cried in public other than this. It was a wild ride. She said she had called everywhere she could think of trying to reach me, including the temple. She was really freaked out because Sam had told her the wound needed to be lanced immediately. Luckily for her, I had already squeeze most of the infection out of my wound and was planning to finish the job after I flew home. At the end of our 30 minutes, we said goodbye before I boarded my plane.
As soon as I got back to my host family's house, I called my mom again. She talked me through finishing the lancing job to get the maximum amount of infection out. I had nothing sharp to cut with or anything, so essentially I was just using my fingers around the wound to find various pockets of infection. I also showered and hand washed all the clothing I had been wearing because it was absolutely disgusting at this point. I went to bed exhausted from a day of medical and flying adventures.
Day 4
I started my day off with a pair of medical video updates to my mom. I'm trying to be really honest on this blog, so I figured I'd put them here as well. In one of them, I am showing her my updated armpit after the makeshift lancing I had given it the day before. The other is a video of my elbow. By this point, I could not move my arm at all from the position it was. I could barely get dressed and raise my arm above my head. Everything hurt.
After sending the medical update, I headed off to spend a morning at La Fundacion. Things were pretty standard that morning. The only difference was me. I was so exhausted and not very fun probably. In the middle of the day, one of the kids accidentally hit my elbow and I almost fainted with the pain. I now understand what the phrase "seeing stars" means because it quite literally took my breath away for a few moments. I could not recover, so I said a quick prayer that I would be able to make it through the rest of the day with my kids. Immediately, the pain was absolutely gone. I know that God loves and cares for each of us and our pains and weaknesses. He cares about our circumstances and what happens to us. This moment was one very strong spiritual experience and testimony of that for me.
After putting the kids down for a nap (you can see how great of nappers they are in the video), I headed home. Remember how in my prayer I asked that I would be able to get through the day with my kids? Well that prayer was answered exactly. As soon as I made it home, I was hit with crippling pain again. I ate a very small lunch before deciding to go rest. I ended up taking a three hour long nap, but I'm sure my body needed it.
After my accidental nap, I visited the doctor who lived in the apartment above mine. I had translated out MRSA, which is what my uncle Sam thought I had, and she agreed and gave me some prescriptions. I ran to the pharmacy around the corner (literally 30 steps away) and bought all the prescriptions I thought I could possibly need. Pharmacies in South America are very different from those in the US because pharmacists will literally just look at your problem and give you whatever they think will solve it. Because of this, I was also given some additional prescriptions. When I got home, I sent Mom pictures of every prescription I was given. She sent them to Sam and we began to coordinate efforts.
Maria Jose came over in the late afternoon and wanted to play. I was no fun and sat on my couch while we chatted. Normally, I would go out in the courtyard and play all sorts of outside games with her and the other kids, but I was too tired. I couldn't even take them to the playground. My body was not up for it. I felt like an absolute loser for not being able to do what I could normally do with no problems, but that's what happens when your body absolutely gives up.
The thing I was most sad about ended up being having to cancel my trip to Casa en el Agua, which literally is a house in the middle of the ocean near the Rosario Islands. I was scheduled to go the next day, but Sam said I was not able to get in the water at all. He told me infections should probably not get wet. I was so sad. I took an early bedtime and cried myself to sleep in physical and emotional pain.
Day 5
Despite going to bed early the night before, I was unable to wake up in the morning. I didn't get up until 11:40. In Cartagena, more than half the day is over by that point as most people get up around 5 or 6am with the sun. Colombia is close to the equator, so the days stay about 12 hours long year round, so the culture is oriented towards the sun.
After I woke up, I was in pretty much constant communication with my mom. We decided together that I would need to come home early. This was particularly devastating for me as she was supposed to come visit me in Colombia in four days. I also did not want to leave because I loved the kids so much and had not been able to say good bye. If you read my journal, I have four whole pages of handwritten notes about each child and their various likes and dislikes because I did not want to forget any of them. I also had various plans written out of places I wanted to take my mom or more areas I wanted to explore. I was quite honestly heartbroken. The day before, I had told my mom I was ready to come home, but that was before it was the only option. The reality was a whole lot different when all my goodbyes were ripped away from me.
I spent the entire day torn up about leaving Colombia. My uncle Sam is an amazing ER doctor, but I wondered if he was exaggerating a bit about the detrimental effects of MRSA. I'm not sure quite why I questioned this though because I know he's good at his job. I cried myself to sleep.
Day 6
When I woke up in the morning, I began to pack up and say my goodbyes to everyone possible. Unfortunately, I was not able to visit anyone at the school because it was closed. The neighborhood kids were visiting somewhere else. Even Jesus, my host brother and Colombian fling, was back in his hometown visiting his family. My host dad was also still working in Santa Marta. My moto taxi driver, Cooper, his wife Ana, their daughter Ashley, and their son Cupertino all were not able to make it over and say goodbye because they had work. I think this was one of the most depressing parts about leaving early. I was not able to say goodbye to all of the people I had come to know and love. I just wanted to have that human connection with people.
While I was packing up, my elbow sore decided to pop and began to ooze infection, much like my armpit lump had a few days before. Because I had done a self-lancing once, I knew a little bit about the procedure. When I was done, my elbow was still really swollen, but the white head of the infection was gone enough for me to squeeze into a jacket. I always like to travel with a jacket and blanket because I am a perpetually cold person and planes are FREEZING!
After packing up everything, I took a quick video of my room and then left for the airport after teary goodbyes with my host family. Marcela, my host mom, did not believe that I really needed to leave because the doctor upstairs had said I was perfectly fine and would be okay with the few minimal prescriptions she had given me. This made my goodbye with Marcela bittersweet and maybe even sadder than it would have been normally.
When I boarded the airplane, I was lucky enough to have an entire row to myself. Maybe the airline was somehow aware that I had one of the most infectious problems on the planet. Either way, I was happy for the extra room as it allowed me to stretch out and have more space. The flight left in the late afternoon, so we also got to watch a really nice sunset out the window of the plane. I'm a sucker for both plane pictures and sunsets either way, so this was a real treat for me. I was glad I got to leave Cartagena during an absolutely stunning sunset.
When I made it to Fort Lauderdale a few short hours later, I got off the plane and made it through customs. I love the Fort Lauderdale airport because the lines there are always really short. I also haven't ever had a bad experience there. After customs, I picked up my luggage and took an Uber to get some real authentic American food. When I'm abroad, I always crave classic American-style food because no one makes it like we do (go figure). I had a delicious strawberry shake (shoutout to my sister Ashlyn), a bacon cheeseburger (definitely not something I would normally eat), and some fries.
At the restaurant, there was actually a barbershop quartet. They all came in together and were in the middle of eating their meal when they began to sing. I thought it was quite awesome. They actually had some pretty good harmonies going. I don't think anyone was expecting it at all, so that may have been part of the reason why I liked it so much. I'm definitely a fan of surprises (at least if they are positive ones).
After the diner, I walked to my Airbnb. It was only a few blocks from the diner, so it was no problem. The hostess stayed up waiting for me until I got there around 10. I shared a room with three other girls, but none of them wanted to chat with me. Honestly, that was just fine with me because I was absolutely exhausted by this point. I went to bed and slept like an absolute rock, despite the less than amazing bunk bed situation we had going on.
Day 7
I'm sure you're about to be absolutely shocked by this based on the fact that I had woken up late every day for the past week, but I woke up late that morning in Fort Lauderdale. When I woke up, I laid in bed for a bit and read a book on my phone. I was really happy because my curly hair had stayed, despite being in AC all night. I really like my curly hair, and I hoped it would stay with me all the way to Utah. Plot twist: it didn't (except when I work out really hard), but I was still happy to see it make an appearance.
When I finally made it out of bed, I decided to have ice cream for breakfast because treat yourself. I ended up at a place called Jaxson's Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant. This place had absolutely massive ice cream that reminded me of the Leatherby's back in Utah. My family goes to Leatherby's to celebrate any special occasion, so this reminded me a lot of my family and home. To be fair, I was headed home that day, so that may also be partially why I was so determined to eat massive ice cream.
After eating a huge serving of ice cream, I headed to the airport. I was a few hours early, but I had nowhere else to go so whatever. I honestly don't mind waiting at airports that much. Anything goes inside an airport. You wanna nap on the floor? Go for it. Talk really loudly on the phone? Totally fine. Be drunk at 11am? Whatever... who cares? The airport is no man's land and therefore, there are no social rules any more. Eventually, I boarded my plane and flew home.
When I made it back to Salt Lake City, both my parents met me. I wanted to go get Leatherby's (I know... I wanted two massive ice creams and nothing else for food), but my parents would not let me. Instead, we went straight to the hospital. There is a great Intermountain Healthcare on 5300 S in Salt Lake, so we headed there to go to the emergency room.
As soon as we walked into the emergency room and mentioned we thought I may have MRSA, they took us straight back into a room and wiped down everything we touched. I got pretty much immediate treatment. MRSA is an infection that spreads to any open wound on your body. It is extremely infectious and will kill anyone within 24 hours of it entering the bloodstream. Uncle Sam said it even killed healthy young adults. I'm sure we got treated so quickly because of this.
Originally, we were given a resident, but then they brought in a specialist. They numbed my elbow and stabbed two holes in it. They squeezed all the infection out and put in a boondoggle to keep the wound open. They gave me strict instructions to soak my elbow three times a day in warm water to get all the rest of the infection out. They also wrote me a prescription for some drugs to make the MRSA go away. My mom filled them first thing the next morning so I would be well. Overall, it was a really pleasant ER experience with great doctors. I headed home happy but exhausted and went to bed in my own bed.
Life Lessons
If you have an infectious disease, go home.
If you can't move your elbow at all, that is probably cause for concern.
Make friends with gay Spanish models because your Instagram following will grow by a ton because others will see the mutual follows and believe you are important.
Always eat massive ice cream.
Don't lance your own wound in an airport bathroom because it is no fun.
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