This post is the conclusion of my series of posts about my journey to Ecuador and its ramifications. It is the most personal post I’ve ever written and I first needed to write all previous entries before I could get to this one. I first needed to talk about the fun bits, my worries, and my quest to find a new house, in order to be able to properly explain what I’m about to tell here; to put it into its right context. Going to Ecuador at that time was a really stupid decision. Here’s the biggest reason why.

Before going, I already suspected something was off. I was drinking huge amounts of liquid, and couldn’t retain it at all and therefore was constantly going back and forth between bathrooms. And yet, I often had a very dry mouth. When going to the bathroom, my urine was often very foamy, all signs that your kidneys aren’t working properly so I wrote it off to that. I was also often very tired, woke up in the middle of the night (to go to the toilet) and sometimes had trouble speaking. And then, a few weeks before I was about to leave, a few really strange things started to happen. Things like meats suddenly started to taste incredibly salty to me, to the point where they were just inedible. My mouth got incredibly dry, to the point where I had trouble actually talking, and where things like bread tasted incredibly dry to the point I almost couldn’t swallow. In that time I developed a big love for fruits and soups: things that you could swallow easily with lots of moisture. (And while soups contain lots of salt, it was diluted enough for me to not notice it).

Weird stuff, but yeah like I wrote about before, I was in a very stressful time, especially after deciding to just buy a house a week before leaving, so I just ignored it. I figured “ah, now is not the time for that; I’ll deal with this once I’m settled”. But yeah, that was too late. I’m not sure what was the trigger. Either the stress of getting all documents ready the day before leaving, or the journey itself. In any case, that’s the point where things got really wrong.

The first day in Ecuador was basically the only day I actually got to be able to do something. I climbed one of the mountains next to the city of Quito for some amazing views. It was a tough climb, took me an hour and a half, but even then it took me a ton of energy and I was completely exhausted at the end, even though I had breezed through similar hikes in the past. Heck, I climbed a volcano not even a year ago in New Zealand, which was a much tougher and longer hike. But I chalked it up to the height Quito laid at: I had never been above 3000 meters before, so I figured it was the lack of oxygen.

But yeah, because of my taste buds my diet became really unhealthy. I’m not talking about junk food: I should have eaten that! Lots of meats, fats and carbs to keep my energy up for such an energy intensive trip, and Ecuador’s junk food was one of the reasons for wanting to go there in the first place. But yeah, since almost all meats tasted awful, and all breads tasted incredibly dry my diet almost exclusively consisted out of fruits and soups. Thankfully, the fruits in Ecuador are amazing, but there’s no way to keep that up. The problems started when I went to the jungle. While I had an amazing time there, I couldn’t even keep up with simple hikes. At this point I really knew something was wrong, and I found it strange I was the only one at the resort to show these symptoms, so it couldn’t have been the altitude difference. We did have a number of swims in the water there, so I figured that I caught some weird bacteria or something. “Ah, I’ll go over, I’ll deal with this when I get back”.

As the journey continued, my energy levels decreased more and more. The last week, basically all I could do was walk around to find something to eat and catch my buses. I hardly saw anything of the cities I visited. This is why my report about the second week is so uneventful: I just slept the rest of the time, I had no energy for anything! (oh, and that one time in the morning where I had to arrange more documents for my mortgage? I also did that in that state, which also took up all of my energy for the rest of the day). When it was finally time to return there still was no time to relax, because due to a full plane, my bags got left behind at the Cuenca airport, so I also had to spend a ton of energy trying to get them back, which in turn also caused me to not pay attention to all of the huge warning signals that my body was giving off.

At that point, everything cost energy. I could barely talk, I was constantly grasping for air. My boss sent me home to take a rest and after a lot of pushing from people I went to see my doctor. He checked up on me, performed a blood sugar test and weighed me. My blood sugar levels were through the roof (above 20!) and when I stood on the scale it told me that I had gone from 50 to 40 kilograms. At this point I looked at myself, and I had lost all of my fat and most of my muscles. My bones were hanging together with what looked like threads and my skin was wrapped incredibly tightly around all of my bones. The doctor sent me to the hospital immediately, which thankfully only was 10 minutes by tram, because I in this state I hardly could exert any force whatsoever.

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I was in the hospital for a day. They performed a full check on me, and at the end of the day a doctor came to me with the message that I had diabetes type 1. I was going to have to inject my self with insulin every single day. For the rest of my life. I was going to have to monitor my blood sugar levels every day for the rest of my life. That one hit me hard.

For those who don’t know the details: there are two types of diabetes. Type 2 mainly exists in older people who have had unhealthy lifestyles, and with type 1 you just have the bad luck that your pancreas (alvleesklier in Dutch) isn’t working properly anymore, and doesn’t provide enough insulin. This insulin in turn is necessary to convert the sugar in your blood to energy, so all this sugar stays in your blood and has nowhere to go, and therefore does long-term damage to parts of your body it has no business in being in, like your feet, kidney and veins. That explains my kidney problems; thankfully those turned out to be completely healthy, instead it was my pancreas.

Since that day, I have been recovering. Things are thankfully getting much better and better, but it really takes a while for your mind and body to find their balance back. My blood sugars are a lot more stable now. I have regained the weight I lost, and I’m getting used to injecting myself like four times a day now. I also have to prick my finger to check on blood multiple times a day. I have definitely conquered my fear of needles by now. It’s tough, because I cannot randomly start eating anymore. I first have to inject myself, based on the amount of carbohydrates and sugars I think I’m going to consume until my next big meal. It’s not the other way around. My blood sugars have to be between a number of specific values. Too high for too long and it causes permanent damage, too low and I feel weak, dizzy and in worst case scenario I faint. It’s a constant puzzle I will have to play for the rest of my life.

Thankfully I already was dabbling around with planning my meals, and I’m good with numbers. Everybody reacts differently to different carbohydrates, so I’m right in the middle of the process of figuring out how much “units” I have to inject for all of the different kinds of foods I eat. On top of that other factors also affect your blood sugars, like exercise, stress. Oh, and this is on top of moving to our new house! Fun!

Also healing doesn’t happen just in a smooth curve. Sometimes, you do everything right and then your body gets confused by this sudden stability. A week ago I suddenly started feeling moisture in my legs, which a day later turned into an enormous edema. Think liters and liters of moisture, inside my legs! To the point where I could barely walk. My doctor told me that this was because my blood sugar values suddenly went from incredibly unstable to stable, resulting in an unbalance of the proteins in my body. She also subscribed me some support stockings though, which did not help any single bit. Thankfully my other doctor gave me a good pressure bandage, which helped alleviate the comfort. It’s now at the point where most of the moisture is gone. Not everything, and I still experience a lot of pain and discomfort, but it’s well on its way out now.

But thankfully, I have been told that I will be fine in the long run. I’m young, and aside from my pancreas I’m perfectly healthy. In theory I can eat anything I want, as long as I inject the right amounts of insulin for it, although eating vast amounts of sugars and fast carbohydrates makes it very difficult to guess how much I need because they cause huge spikes in your blood sugars. However, if we hang out, just be prepared that at times I will need to prick myself to check my values, and before the big meals I need to sit down and inject myself.

I have changed because of this, and I will change even more. But I told myself not to let this dominate my life. I did decide to make a number of changes in my life. Balance will be the key. I can go out and have fun, or do something unhealthy or exhausting, as long as I balance it out and take my rest around it. Also, no more really crazy stuff. Considering everything, I have also decided to stop travelling to all kinds of crazy places around the world. I did that this year, and asked myself the honest question: what do you like better, these tough Eastern European countries, or just plain Western Europe? And the answer was Western Europe. So from now on I will continue travelling, I’d still love to roam around, but I’ll keep my journeys to the western part of the continent, and Japan. It’ll cost more, and take more of my time doing so. It’ll cost more but so be it. I’l go for more quality instead of quantity.

I will still be the same Peter, only with a few more issues. If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for taking the time to read, and I hope that we can still make lots of great memories in the future.