Hi everybody! It feels great to be writing to you all again. I had to take these past two weeks and condense them into this blog post due to more traveling for my program and some health concerns—but don’t worry, we’ll dive into that soon.
The week leading up to my trip to northern Patagonia was nothing special, just more crunch time with submitting assignments before we left. My program stayed in Puerto Natales for that period and when I was not in classes I primarily was locking myself away to grind on my assignments, as well as a fellowship application that I had been working on since the summer and was due at the end of the week. I won’t lie and say it was a great week because, in all honesty, it was probably one of the most stressful (may I go back to the lesson learned that studying abroad is not always sunshine and rainbows). However, like any other stressful week in college, I got through it in one piece. Something to keep in mind that will make for a fun story later in this post is that a few days before I left for northern Patagonia, I accidentally hit my head on a door but ignored it and didn’t think anything of it. Afterward, I had a nonstop headache for about 2-3 days that I also ignored and didn’t think anything about (do you see where this is going?) If you haven’t caught on yet, I was also quite tired and slightly sensitive to light, but I was too stressed to care and wanted all of my assignments done (hopefully we’re on the same page now).
Fast forward to the day I was leaving for northern Patagonia. I woke up to leave Puerto Natales for the airport at 5 am with my group (I had a headache). We drove the almost-3 hours to the airport in Punta Arenas, smoothly went through security, and waited to board our plane (headache was still there but I took a Tylenol because that’s what you do when you’ve had a headache for 3 days, right?).
We boarded our flight, I did some readings for an assignment, and before I knew it, we were getting ready to land. The initial views of everything were BEAUTIFUL. The entire area was covered with trees and with it being the peak of spring everything was multiple shades of green. After being in a place for about two months where tree diversity is about 3 species, it’s pretty easy to be amazed by that type of thing. We set out to our first destination for two nights, which was Parque Katalapi. The park is privately owned and primarily used for research, and my group was going to do half of our plant phenology project there. The photos don’t do it justice because it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve been. The significance of northern Patagonia compared to the south is that it’s a part of the Valdivian Temperate Rainforest, which is a completely different ecosystem than everything south of it.
The first night at Katalapi was when I crashed. It was about 7 pm and I could barely keep my eyes open and it felt like all the energy I had was completely drained (joke’s on me because I barely had any energy from the start of that day). I talked to my student affairs manager and, for the first time, said,
“Hey, maybe I have a concussion! Not sure, just a feeling.”
So, I went to bed early that night to rest my head and hoped that maybe the exhaustion was from all the built-up stress of the last week. When I woke up that morning after sleeping for a little over 12 hours, my headache felt incredibly better, but it wasn’t 100%, which is when I told my student affairs manager, “Yup, time for a field trip to the hospital!”
I’m now going to spare you from the rest of those hours waiting at the hospital since I arrived there at 3:30 pm and didn’t leave until after midnight. BUT to make a long story short, I indeed gave myself a concussion by slamming my head onto a door the previous week. Shocker, I know. After doing eval tests and getting a CT scan my doctor told me it was mild, but I still needed to rest and sleep as much as my body felt was necessary. The good news was that I didn’t necessarily have to miss a certain number of classes or like myself in a dark room for two weeks. I essentially could live my normal life while also cutting down on-screen usage for the rest of that week as well as do only what didn’t give me a headache.
All of my professors were extremely accommodating and willing to help in any way, which I am so grateful for. The rest of that week we visited Parque Valle Los Ulmos, which was a protected park that experienced the 2015 Osorno volcano eruption and received about a 46 cm layer of tephra (volcanic debris) on the entire park, as well as Senda Darwin, a very popular research site on Chiloé Island. With all of the rest, I was feeling so much better by the end of the week and I’m glad I was able to enjoy everything with my classmates.
The lesson of this post, if you haven’t assumed it already, is to LISTEN TO YOUR BODY. It doesn’t matter where you are or your current load of responsibilities. I ignored every aspect of my injury and because of that, I felt horrible and also had the possibility of making the concussion much worse. I did not want to inconvenience myself with dealing with a concussion while studying abroad, which is the silliest thing I could have done. I’m lucky my injury was only mild and that I had such a great support system around me. I learned the importance of self-advocacy and voicing when I felt like something was wrong, even though I should have at a much earlier time. My lesson is learned and it’s something I will never do again since my health is much more important than any activity or trip I will be on.
For this week coming up, I’m leaving tomorrow to do fieldwork and take my finals in Patagonia Bagual, which is a privately-owned section of the northern part of Torres del Paine National Park. The exciting part is that we will all be camping, which also means I will be without Wi-Fi and cell service until Friday, so expect my next post to be this weekend. Stay tuned for updates about Patagonia Bagual and I’ll talk to you all soon. Thanks for reading!
Abroad Patagonia. 