Later that evening as I headed to bed for the night, 12 hours or so after getting back, I felt myself physically wither - I started to feel a dull-but-intense headache, my joints and muscles began to ache so that I just could not find a way to lie comfortably, and I oscillated between being too hot and too cold.
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| Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler were the first to reach Everest's 29,029ft. summit without the aid of supplemental oxygen. They took 3 months to acclimatize and summit. |
At first I thought I was coming down with the flu, but soon realized that I was coming up against something I had never experienced in all of my time spent at high altitude: altitude sickness, or more correctly, altitude illness.
According the NOLS Wilderness Medicine Handbook, altitude illness "results from insufficient oxygen in the blood (hypoxia) secondary to decreased barometric pressure at altitude."
I know that altitude-related symptoms can affect anyone who does not take time to adequately acclimatize no matter their level of physical conditioning, but since I had never experienced symptoms before and had maintained an active lifestyle during my travels, even traveling as high as 10,000ft. while in Europe, I honestly did not expect it to affect me when I returned.
In light of my recent humbling experience, this post will look at some ways that the NOLS Wilderness Medicine Institute and the non-profit group The Mountaineers recommend preventing altitude illness, with a follow up post to discuss assessing and treating altitude illness in the field.
