Arpil 9 - Namche 11,200 Grapple turning to snow and thunder

I slept well last night. How you sleep is a strong indicator of how your body is adjusting to the increasing altitude. As we move higher the air becomes thinner. The oxygen percentage in the air we breathe – about 22% with the balance being mostly nitrogen – does not change. However because the air is less dense there are less of those little O2 molecules running around in each breath to make our tissues happy. That is a problem. Our most important job over the next weeks is to get our body to adapt to this thinner air.

Fortunately we are as the Bible says “fearfully and wonderfully made”. Given time most people will acclimatize to these thinner elevations. Unfortunately it takes times and is not pleasant. To put this in perspective I once owned a pressurized plane. The manual said that if we suffered an explosive decompression – a window blew out for example – at 18,000’ the pilot only had about 2.5 minutes of useful consciousness. After that they would pass out and eventually die. Everest base camp is at 18,000 feet and we will live there the next 6 weeks. Interestingly when someone has to be evacuated from base camp the helicopter pilots who are coming from 4,500 feet must wear oxygen. If for some reason they can’t get the helicopter back off the ground they could die with out supplemental oxygen until they could be evacuated themselves.

Upon moving to higher altitude the body initially says “what are you doing”. This message is delivered in a variety of ways including nausea and head aches. We commonly refer to that as altitude sickness. If you stick to your guns eventually your body will start the adaptation process. Step one is to change the blood chemistry. The most noticeable effect of this is increase urination while the body makes the blood more acidic so it can transport O2 more efficiently. The heart rate also increases and sleep becomes more sporadic. All this is accompanied by a feeling of lethargy – the body’s way of saying “let’s stay here until I can make this adaption”.

Step two in the process is to make more red blood cells. This however is a longer process and really won’t start having an effect for several weeks. At that point many climbers hematocrit count (the number of red blood cells in a given amount of blood) will almost double. That creates its own issue. As your blood gets thicker you are more likely to have a stroke. A stroke cut Sir Edmund Hillary’s climbing career short in his 30’s. I have had at least two friends who have had this problem. There are ways to monitor and control this but it isn’t normally a problem for most people. I do know one guy who went back to Everest after a previous stroke on the mountain. A couple of days before his summit bid he had a liter of blood drained and two liters of saline put back to thin his blood. He summited but I wonder if his wife knew.

Unfortunately, I woke up this morning with stomach issues. I and imodium chose to hike anyway. Suffice it to say I have had much more pleasant days. By the time I got to Namche 4.5 walking hours later I had the chills, fever and all the unpleasantness that comes with some kind of sickness especially at altitude. I started Cipro. I’m a walking drug store. Eventually the symptoms begin to subside by late night I had moved up from feeling miserable to just feeling ugly. It probably didn’t help that the trip usually takes about 6 hours and I probably went faster than I should have. Shortly after arriving it begin to rain hard which quickly turned to grapple – ice pellets – and then to snow. Several of the guys had failed to pack their gear in plastic bags inside their trekking duffels. Their stuff was soaked. The joys of climbing. This an absolutely beautiful village clinging to the side of a mountain. I’ll share more on that tomorrow. I will spend an extra day maybe two here to be sure I have totally over this and my acclimatization has caught up. As they say on the slopes of Kilimanjaro in Africa – “poli, poli”. Slowly, Slowly.