Queasy in Quito

I’d love to know what she told her friends

Drenched in sweat, the relief and comfort I now felt were overshadowed by my extreme embarrassment.

Earlier that evening, my stomach had begun sounding like an approaching storm with ever increasing periods of rolling thunder. Perhaps the ice in that smoothie I had enjoyed on my final day in Panama was made with unpurified water. Now I was paying for it.

The 2-hour flight from Panama City to Quito seemed to take an eternity with numerous unexpected sprints to the toilet, certain I was about to expel everything I’d eaten in the past 24 hours, only to be disappointed when nothing would come out.

Now that I was off the plane, my stomach was suddenly feeling calm. Maybe whatever it was that had been causing my ailment had gone away.

It was around 10 pm when I arrived at the small, quaint hotel in the Mariscal Sucre neighborhood of central Quito. The owner greeted me in Spanish and walked me to my room on the second floor. The 12 rooms of the hotel were arranged in a “C” shape, 6 on each of the two floors, facing into a small courtyard. As I walked past the other rooms, all were dark, most with their curtains open, obviously indicating they were unoccupied. It appeared I was the only guest staying there.

I entered my room and plopped down on the bed, letting out a huge sigh of relief that I could finally relax. The bed was quite noisy, giving a high-pitched creaking sound with even the slightest movement, but the mattress was comfortable and inviting. It felt heavenly. Then again, if it had been a concrete slab, it probably would have felt just as satisfying. It was a pleasure to just relax after having gone through that nightmare stomach ache during my flight to Ecuador.

But then I started feeling it again, that queasy feeling in my stomach that made me jump up from the bed, dash to the bathroom and kneel before the toilet bowl, sure that I was about to make an offering to the porcelain god. I hung my head inside the bowl and waited for what I was certain would be the expulsion of the full contents of my innards to begin. But nothing.

I moaned and spoke out loud, “What is wrong with me?! I feel so sick! Why can’t I just throw up?!” I continued my moaning and vocal complaining as I picked myself up off the bathroom floor and slowly shuffled back to the bed, my head hanging dejectedly.

I gently laid down, halting my verbal outbursts for the moment to enjoy some peace and quiet, the only sound being that annoying creaking from the bed every time I would move. As before, the bed provided comfort at first, but within a few minutes there was that feeling of something rumbling in my stomach, intensifying and beginning to work its way up my esophagus.

Jump, dash, kneel again. Followed by another unsuccessful attempt at evacuating my stomach of whatever was causing the discomfort.

As I slowly walked back to the bed, I moaned and proclaimed loudly, “I just want to throw up! Why can’t I throw up?! Why am I so sick?!”

Falling back on the bed, I sighed then wailed and complained, “What is going on?! Why is this happening to me?”. As I laid there, I began feeling a little better, as long as I didn’t move. Maybe it wasn’t necessary for me to throw up in order to feel better.

But then, I had that feeling in my stomach again, the one that signaled it wanted to be emptied. However, this time it felt different, more severe.

The moment I knelt down at the toilet bowl I understood why. A torrent of my stomach contents hurled from my mouth like a firehose being intermittently turned on and off. It went on for a good two minutes.

Finally, there was nothing left to come out. I got up off the bathroom floor, returned to the bed, and collapsed on it sideways. I let out a sigh of relief and spoke my satisfaction, “Ahhh, I feel so much better now. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

As I laid there calmly, drenched in sweat, motionless and content, a sound I hadn’t heard before unexpectedly pierced the silence. A creaking sound.

I was hearing the bed in the room next door.

All this time I had assumed I was the only one staying in the hotel. Now I knew I was wrong.

And if the walls were thin enough that I could hear the creaking of a bed next door when the room’s occupant moved in it, then that occupant most certainly had been hearing all of my moaning, my loud complaints about how I felt, my constant cries of “woe is me”.

I suddenly felt very embarrassed.

Then I heard my next-door neighbor cough lightly. Unmistakably, a young female.

Even more embarrassment.

I knew that my top priority in the morning would be to apologize to that young lady for all the unsolicited commentary I had provided about my illness, to let her know I didn’t realize there was someone next door.

I drifted off to sleep, a smile on my face, feeling so much better now that I had eliminated the distress from my stomach. But several hours later, just before the sun came up, I was awakened by some new noises coming from the room next door.

The female occupant was closing up her suitcase, rolling it across the floor, opening the door and leaving.

I never saw her. I never got a chance to apologize to her.

I can only imagine what she must have thought during those 20 minutes of moaning, ranting and expulsion coming from my room.

I’m sure it interrupted her sleep that night. But at least it gave her a memorable story to share with family and friends about the man next door in the Quito hotel who would not shut up about being sick.