Today I woke up not feeling so great after having had a difficult night, where I felt sick nd couldn’t drink any liquids in the night/ sleep throughout the night. I went to breakfast to see the group and talk to my guide so he could give me some recommendations on what to do. After seeing him we decided to go see the doctor at basecamp to make sure everything was okay.
We went to see the doctor who did a full check of everything, checking my oxygen levels (87%), heart rate, lungs etc… and saw that apart from me struggling to eat everything was well with me. So he decided to give me a shot of a drug to help me eat and drink so I can make sure I was hydrated correctly. following this visit, I went on with my day, doing what we are supposed to do on a rest day, aka eat, sleep, repeat. I was starting to feel progressively better throughout the day, but as a precaution the doctor wanted to see me again just before dinner.
Just before dinner, we went back to the doctor’s tent for a follow-up, and despise feeling better, my vitals had gone down, I had lost 10% of oxygenation level (down to 77%) in only 5 hours, and the doctor could hear fluid in my lungs so he diagnosed me with a Pulmonary Edema (water in my lungs) and informed me that with this condition I would be unable to continue up the mountain, and it would only get worst and more life-threatening the longer I stayed on the mountain. He, therefore, ordered my immediate evacuation from the base camp by helicopter. the only solution to a pulmonary edema is to be back in a respectable altitude, under 2500m from sea level, as soon as possible.
As they called the helicopter, I had to rush to my tent to repack all my bags to make sure Mathieu had everything he needed to stay on the mountain, whilst taking all my stuff back to the city, I then said to Mathieu and the rest of the group, as I was brought over to the helipad, where my helicopter landed and I hopped aboard. Once aboard the helicopter (with 2 angry bird plushtoys as mascots), it lifted off, flying up above Basecamp circling the camp as it went higher and higher up (to 5000m). as we reached a ridge the helicopter dipped into another valley, and flew over the other basecamp, on its way to the bottom of the valley, where it dropped me off, unfortunately, we were still too high (3000m) and I still had to go back down further.
From there I was picked up by a van that drove us 3-4h back to Mendoza, slowly going down toward sea level. we arrived at Mendoza at around midnight where I was able to get to the hotel and get some sleep before the next day when I will have to organize the logistics for the rest of my trip.