Spring 2023 Adventure begins with a …. Bang?

Leaving the United States turned out to be filled with more obstacles than anticipated.  First and foremost, my father passed away 11 days before my flight.  It was very hard to leave my mother so soon after this, but we accomplished a lot in the little time I had and I felt like she was doing ok when I left.  I left her in Lake Havasu City, Arizona and drove to San Diego, CA.  I was flying out of San Diego and leaving my car there for a few months until I returned.  About 10 hours before my flight, I started feeling ill with bad pain and tenderness on the left side of my abdomen.  I had felt this before and knew it was a flare up of diverticulitis.   I had an emergency stash of antibiotics for this and took my first one the night before my early morning flight.  When I awoke the next morning around 5am, I was starting to feel feverish from the inflammation and infection in my guts.  This was going to be a rough journey.  My first layover was in Atlanta and by the time I arrived there, I was feeling like death.  I found a place to lie down for a bit on the floor and slept at least 1 hour of my 4 hour layover.  Getting on the plane to Madrid, I was still feeling like hell in a handbag and took something to help me sleep through the long flight.  With pain in my guts, fever and chills, I did my best to sleep through the 7+ hours to Madrid where I would have another 5 hour layover before heading to Malta.  By the time I reached Madrid, I was anticipating the antibiotics would have kicked in and to start to feel better, but this was a particularly severe bout and I was still feeling quite poorly.  I again found a place on the floor and slept again for another hour and a half, then waited to board the last leg to Malta.  I was planning on taking the bus from the airport in Malta to the town in Sliema where I was renting an apartment for 6 days.  I thought this was a good way to save about $15.00, but the way I was feeling, I did not want to have to bother with figuring it out and hauling my bags around so I messaged my apartment host while I was in Madrid and took him up on his previous offer to arrange a transport directly from the airport to the door of the apartment.  Mario was waiting for me as I exited the airport and he dropped me off at the apartment at around 5:30pm.  I was exhausted and still in major discomfort so I did nothing but crawl into bed and sleep the rest of the night.  I also stayed in bed all of the following day to give my body time to recoup and for the antibiotics to finally do their job.  By the middle of that day, my fever was gone and although I still had some belly tenderness, I felt I was on the mend.  I used the Bolt Food app, which is like Uber Eats, to order some soup that evening and then went back to bed for the night. I was disappointed that I was wasting time in bed but I knew I needed to fully recover before going back to “normal” so that I could enjoy the rest of my trip, hopefully infection free. By the middle of the next day, I felt well enough to take a shower, put on clean clothes and walk around the town a bit, grabbing some more soup at a local café/bakery on my way back to my apartment.  I felt like one more night and by the following day I would be good to start doing some sight seeing.  I bought a 6 day unlimited bus pass as that would be how I planned to get around the island to all of the places I wanted to visit.