Rash Decisions

Day 1 : St Helena to Ascension Island

Friday, March 4th 2022

It’s 1am on Saturday morning, and I’m sitting in Perth General Hospital Accident and Emergency.

An hour earlier, I’d been lying in bed in the spare room of my relatively new girlfriend’s mother’s house. This was a big deal – we’d flown out together from Sydney to meet the family, so clearly things were going well.

After a lovely dinner during which I was on my best behaviour, we’d retired to separate bedrooms – this was going to be a chaste and respectable visit, of course.

The itchiness had come on slowly, then rapidly, then agonisingly. And when I got up and inspected myself in the bathroom mirror, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Giant, angry looking welts all over my body. At least 30 or 40 of them.

I woke up my girlfriend. “We need to go to hospital”.

As I sat there, mortified, waiting for my turn at the reception desk, a guy was rushed in past me with an axe sticking out of his forehead, with a surprisingly little amount of blood – it’s funny the things you notice.

5 minutes later, I was virtually pushed away from the reception desk as two police officers manhandled a deranged woman through the A&E department – naked from the waist down, she was off her face on ice, and her yells and screams could be heard for a solid 10 minutes after she disappeared around a corner, before there was a merciful silence as presumably she was sedated.

Eventually it was my turn to face the beleaguered receptionist. “Er, I think I have a bit of a rash”.

“Take a seat”, she said wearily – “We’ll get to you when we can”.

By the time I was seen some 5 hours later, I’d come to realise two things.

Firstly, Accident and Emergency departments on a Saturday night in a city are not quite sufficiently entertaining to distract you from an all over body itching and burning sensation.

And secondly, it had turned out that at the age of 30, having never had an allergic reaction in my life, I had suddenly developed severe allergies.

Since that first time, I’ve never had such a severe response, but certain soaps and perfumes can trigger me, and I always have some anti-histamines on hand.

And that’s the context in which we had to decide yesterday, with less than half an hour before our planned departure, whether the rash that had developed on my ankles, and the welts on my upper thighs, over the past 24 hours, were sufficient reason to leave behind the oasis of hospital and medical facilities in St Helena for the desert of 4,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean ahead of us, with only the presumably very basic facilities at Ascension Island some 5 or 6 days away as a potential solution if things got bad.

We were already in a heightened state of anxiety, as just half an hour before that, someone else on board had made a rash decision of their own.

We had just returned from our final trip ashore at St Helena, where we’d completed our checkout procedures and picked up some last minute groceries, when suddenly Coco started foaming at the mouth.

A lot.

When she then started vomiting, we speculated that perhaps she had picked up a vibe about our impending departure, and was just a little nervous. She has nervously vomited at the beginning of passages before.

But quickly it became apparent that this was something different. No sooner had we mopped up one vomit, and she had done another. And another. And another. After 6 or 7 episodes, we started to get really worried.

She was in some distress, and so were we.

I called St Helena Radio on the VHF, and asked for a phone number for a vet on the island. And then called them from our satellite phone. While I was waiting to be put through, we started wondering whether perhaps there was some poison or pesticides on some of the groceries we’d just brought back – Coco has a habit of closely sniffing and inspecting everything that comes on board.

I wasn’t able to speak to the vet immediately, but spoke to an assistant, who assured me that he’d find the vet and get some advice for us, if I could just call back in an hour.

In the meantime, Jen tried washing Coco’s mouth out, and also started insepcting the boat for any signs of anything untoward that Coco might have ingested.

And that’s when she found half a chopped chilli on the kitchen floor!

By the time we got a hold of the vet, Coco had stopped drooling and vomiting, and the vet confirmed that this was typical behaviour if a cat had eaten or even just licked something they found unpleasant, and so long as it ceased within the hour, there was nothing to worry about.

Phew!

Now it was time to think about the human health ramifications of departing.

The cause of my rash and welts seemed fairly apparent. We had just completed two days of serious hiking, and the rash was exactly where my socks had poked out of my hiking boots. It seemed likely that some kind of allergen had gotten between my socks and my ankles, and then been solidly rubbed in for 10km of hiking. And the welts were presumably some kind of antigenic response.

I had taken some anti-histamines the night before at the first sign of the rash, but that didn’t seem to be making much of a difference to it, although the welts were calming down.

I had no other symptoms that might point to anything more serious, and with more than 24 hours having elapsed since my interaction with the likely allergen, and a plentiful supply of hydrocortisone on board, we made the decision to go.

There’s always a low level of anxiety on board at the beginning of any passage, and the events of the past few hours definitely added to the slight sense of uneasiness.

But in less than 3 minutes from departing the anchorage, we had the engine off, the sails up, and were bowling along at 7 knots with perfect wind angle and strength.

Steely had immediately found her stride, and as St Helena receded into the distance, Coco seemed to have forgotten the consequences of her rash decision, while I took the opportunity to contemplate the best decision of my life – to move on from that relationship all those years ago, and find and marry Jen, without which this passage wouldn’t have been happening at all.

Day 1 Statistics:
Time on passage so far: 17 hours
Distance Covered: 103 nautical miles
Average Speed: 6.0 knots
Distance to Go: 608 nautical miles

Number of allergic reactions that have required hospital visits since the first one: 0