Ok - this post includes frankly childish and graphic commentary on the effects of food poisoning - you have been warned! This is in response to two things - both extending from Twitter! One is that @flylilypad blogged the full version of something I’d laughed at that she’d done last week and so now it’s my turn I guess and also because @anglais_in_sete has similar problems at the moment and I thought a good laugh might cheer her up!
For the last two years, I have spent some time in Romania in April on fieldwork. This basically involves flying to the other side of Europe, having a night in Bucharest which is A Fantastic City, embarking on a 3h drive to the Black Sea, spending an afternoon in a Cave then doing it all in reverse to get home. When in Mangalia in 2010 - the beautiful city next to which the all important cave is located - we stayed in a field-station belonging to the Grupul de Explorari Subacvatice si Speologice - a caving and underwater exploration group for hobbyists and professionals. This little field-station is about 2 metres from the beach and the view from the kitchen, big bedroom, bathroom and laboratory windows are of the sea. Waking up to the sound of the sea is something I’ve not experienced many times in my life. There’s something about the Black Sea - it’s so powerful and enormous and yet it’s enclosed, which makes it feel much smaller and like you could tame it somehow.
To get to the station, you have to drive around the back of the local hospital to a little carpark right outside the front door. It’s a pretty basic building that was added to over the years and now boasts two stories and a cellar. The front door is located just underneath a flight of stairs and the entire exterior is covered in weathered stucco, battered by the winds, rain and spray. Once inside, you are in a little lobby area with cupboards the wall to the right, floor to ceiling, all containing various laboratory chemicals. On this wall is the door through to the laboratory itself. Straight ahead is the door to the bathroom - it has a toilet, a wash basin and a really warm shower. Just outside the bathroom door to the left is a big, red, metal trapdoor, leading down to a small basement in which sulfidic waters can be obtained by turning on a tap, which leads from the aquifer. The whole of the Mangalia area is geologically active and most of the groundwater is heavily sulfidic. As the sulfide gases rise up from the basement, they have corroded and prematurely aged much of the building above. To the left of the trapdoor is the main room of the station - the kitchen. It has a big dining table with seating for about 7 people over in the far corner and then a long counter along the middle of the room, to one side of which is the kitchen itself - it’s very basic, with a Belfast sink, cooker that doesn’t always work properly, microwave, fridge and two big bookcases for storage. A strange staircase rises up from the corner of the room to a microscopic hallway, from which one can access the two bedrooms. The bigger one has a view of the Black Sea and has a double bed and a double bunk-bed, theoretically sleeping 6 people, though we used it for 4 when we were there. It was the girl’s dorm, but Vlad, our amazing caving assistant stayed in there too, with his girlfriend Alex, who is our amazing cave biologist and SCUBA diver. Our female Ph.D student (E) and our collaboratrix from Germany (T) completed the four. In the small bedroom there is a double bunk bed, so space for 4 people but myself and my Ph.D student (K) slept in there - I was on the bottom bunk because K insisted he got the top one. Fine by me. Behind the bed is a door that you can’t open because the beds are in the way. If you go back outside and climb up the external staircase, you can get into the room that this door leads to from the small bedroom - it’s a seminar room, effectively, and stands above the laboratory. It has maps of the Cave on the walls and it’s big enough for teaching a class of 10-20, with lovely views of the Sea as one wall has lovely big windows!
In hindsight, out 2010 trip was unpleasant. Firstly, it being the first field trip I’d organised and also my first time leading a caving expedition, it was stressful. The Icelandic volcano added to the stress as we didn’t know if we’d be able to get home easily - we did in the end and were less than 24h late, having been taken from Amsterdam to Birmingham by coach through the night instead of our scheduled 1h flight. In hindsight, we were there too long. We’d planned a lot of work and so had gone for almost 2 weeks. This year, we did it all (and more) in just 4 days - a much better way to do these things! Another aspect that added to the stress was that some of us came down with food poisoning. Now, this was of the really mild variety and I’m pretty certain it was caused by the normal bugs you find in tap water - we’re all used to the ones we drink all the time at home, but expose us to a new one and our bodies leap into action to destroy it…and in the meantime cause us a lot of pain and inconvenience! Now I am not a medical microbiologist, but I studied it at University as part of my degree and I teach it, so I had a fair idea we were all victim to that little rascal Escherichia coli.
Escherichia coli is one of 5 members the genus Escherichia with validly published names, though it has the distinction of being the Type species, which means it’s a good representation of the genus as a whole - though, I have to point out that E. coli is not a good example of an Escherichia species! It’s much, much more like an example of the genus Shigella. This is one of few very, very rare examples of the Bacteriological Code being pushed to one side in order to help medics. There are four species within the genus Shigella and technically speaking, all four of them AND E. coli are identical - the only difference is the symptoms they cause in ill humans when they infect us and so, to make it easier for patients to be treated properly, they are named as five different species when they should really only be one. ANYWAY, I digress! In 1885, Theodor Escherich isolated an organism that he called “Bacterium coli commune”, meaning “the shared bacterium of the colon”. Several years later, it was named for Escherich as Escherichia coli. It is a very useful organism in the lab as a model organism and for using for genetics experiments to carry genes or to make proteins - insulin for diabetics is made by E. coli, for example.
Back to Romania. So, several days after my first cave expedition last year, K came down with a rather upset tummy of the kind with no yacking up [yack (verb) to vomit]. He went to bed straight after dinner which is unlike him, whilst the rest of us sat up playing cards and getting tight on gin and tonic. When I eventually went to bed, he was fast asleep (snores like a wildebeast) and I had to get undressed in the dark so as not to wake him. I crawled into my sleeping bag (we were sleeping in sleeping bags on the mattresses of the bed rather than using blankets etc, owing to how cold it got in the station at night) and got comfortable in a pleasant, gin-stewed haze. Next thing I know, I’m waking up. Is it morning? Where’s my phone? Oh. 0300. Why was I awake? Because K was climbing down from his bunk with all the grace of an elephant in moon boots. He vanished out of the door and thundered downstairs. Back to sleep. Awake again. 0430. Same again…and so on, all through the night - the poor lad. By the time it was time to get up, neither of us had had any proper sleep and I was A Very Grumpy Boy!
Alex suggested that we should walk to the nearby village of Doi Mai (2nd of May) where we had been for dinner a few nights before and have lunch, as it was a beautifully sunny day. Alex, myself, K (now feeling better) and E all set off and walked first through Mangalia onto the main road then walked the 3.5 miles down the coast to Doi Mai. Between Mangalia and Doi Mai is Lake Limanu - a huge lake that connects to the Black Sea. The road crosses the Lake at a quarter-mile-long bridge, with spectacular views of the Lake, the Sea and the Daewoo Shipyard. Now, people who know me know that I have a few phobias, all of which are totally irrational. One of them is “ships in dry-dock and submarines”. Ships in water - fine. Ships in dry-docks - no thank you. The underside of a ship makes me panic and feel physically sick. Why? Not a clue. Doesn’t really bother me as I see them so rarely! It was a beautifully sunny day and the four of us walked slowly down into Doi Mai, lazed on the beach in the sun for an hour or so and then had lunch at Sea Temple, which is quite a nice restaurant built up on the cliffs of Doi Mai. I had a chicken and pasta kind of thing - I remember that much. We set off back home, lazily walking along the beach and I remember that I could see a phytoplankton bloom not too far out, which reminded me of the work I did in my Ph.D. K and I were about 1/4 mile ahead of Alex and E on the way back and just as we got to the bridge over Lake Limanu, I got that horrible cold sweaty feeling. That one that you know is going to be followed in just minutes by your bowels exploding. I stopped in my tracks and confessed to K what was happening. After he’d stopped laughing out me, our pace quickened and we started to almost run back to the station. It was about 1.5 miles from where we were to the station, so that was quite some distance! As always, literally 50 metres from the door, it got 100x worse! We’d made a plan, K would run ahead and unlock the door so that I could run straight in to the bathroom without delay. All I will say is that I was SECONDS away from a very embarrassing accident!!!
All this because of sweet little E. coli! The poor thing had decided my innards would make a nice home and so had started to multiply. My body had said “no chance” and had literally tried to flush them out - how I wish it had asked “is this an ok time and place to do this?”! Poor K - he was fine that night but I kept him awake when I got up every hour like he had the night before. The next day, both of us were exhausted and crabby after two nights of no sleep AND the toll of being ill too. And to top that? That was the day we left for England - both feeling absolutely awful from lack of sleep…and then spent that night on a coach…3 nights of no decent sleep and I got home A Very Grumpy Man. I went to bed about 5pm and stayed there.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Please say stuff.