McLean

Hi, everyone. This is Andrew McLean back from a brief, six-day jaunt with pulmonary edema. Yippee!

I never thought that I'd come down with it myself, but it turns out to be a lot easier than I ever would have expected. Here's my surefire recipe: 1. Get sick, 2. Deny that you are sick, 3. Rush to high altitude. Voilé! Next thing you know, at the end of every deep breath, you'll feel an eerie little "pfffst" like a little someone is spritzing your lungs with a little vapor atomizer. There's nothing to it.

In my case, I picked up a nasty stomach bug just as we were leaving Nyalam, which left me unable to eat or sleep as we started the approach. With all of our camping gear loaded onto the yaks, we had no choice but to follow in their hoofprints, as they blazed what is normally a three-day approach in two. Instead of a nice slow acclimatizing hike, our elevation gain profile looked more like somebody jumping on a diving board — the first day we gained about 800 vertical feet, then the next day we cranked out 10 miles and over 4,000-vertical feet, which left us at a 17,200ft Base Camp. Gasp, gasp, gasp.

Everyone, except Alex of course, was pretty well whipped by this, and all I wanted to do was eat and go to sleep. Eating was out of the question, as my stomach was acting like a Superball and ejecting everything I tried to put down it. Second best was sleeping, but with a raging headache that also was out of the question. After about 10 minutes, I tried to take a deep breath and relax, but suddenly felt a little "pffffst" right at the end of my breath. Hmmmm. What had I read about that? Again I tried to clear it, but unlike other ailments, it just seemed to be slowly building instead of going away. Sh*t!!

As it was about 12:30 at night, I debated holding out until morning and tried to remember anything I'd read about PE. Does it get better? How long do I have? After a few more minutes, I started to feel a definite pooling in my lungs and, as much as I didn't want to, I decided I had to head down.

Packing up seemed to take forever as it was pitch black and everything was still put away in massive duffel bags. I started to panic and grabbed whatever I could — bivy bag, sleeping bag and med-kit. Stepping out of the tent was like a bad dream, it was snowing and the yak drivers were chasing their yaks through our camp trying to put blankets on the ones that needed them. I stumbled over to Alex's tent to let him know what I was up to, "Alex, I have fluid in my lungs. I'm going down. Now."

Alex immediately woke up and said he was coming with me. "I have to go. You can follow my tracks in the snow. I could use some socks and GU."

About 20 minutes later, Alex caught up with me and steered me in the right direction. Mike Brown came along as well and packed the Gamow bag. As we were too low, we had to traverse across a stumble talus field covered in snow. It seemed like all of my reserves were giving out at once. I was exhausted and we had only dropped about 1,000ft. My headlamp battery suddenly gave out and in the time it took to change it, it completely shut down.

"I have to stop. Right here." Even though we were in the middle of a sloping boulder field, Alex kicked a few aside and I crawled into my bivy bag for four hours of sleep.

Back at Base Camp

Waking up the next morning, I felt much better, but we still had to continue down. Mike went back to Base Camp and Alex and I continued down to the town of Nyalam where we stayed for two days. Kris ended up joining us a day later due to headaches. On the third day, Alex cruised all the way back to Base Camp while Kris and I went up about halfway. The next day, Kris continued up while I took one more day to slowly climb the last 1,000ft to camp.

All in all, pulmonary edema is something you can really live without experiencing, but in retrospect I'm glad to have been through it. Why? I'm still not sure.

— Andrew McLean, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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