Terence's @rchive

Before I set off for Tibet, I’ve been hearing and reading a lot on altitude sickness. It’s best to accend to a high altitude location slowly. Preferbly go up around 2000m and stay there for a night to acclimatize before going higher. One point that I read that worries me is that people who are active in sports might get hit harder by altitude sickness. Since Lhasa is around 3600m above see level and I’m flying straight in, it is indeed quite a worrying situation for me.

I found that medications that help cope with altitude sickness are Acetazolamide(Diamox) or Tibetan Herb call Hong Jing Tian (红景天). I bought Acetazolamide because I couldn’t find Hong Jing Tian and there are some articles to confirm the effectiveness of Acetazolamide. I bought each pill for RM1.50.

Acetazolamide needs to be taken 1 day before going to high altitude locations. I wanted to test how my body will react to the high altitude, so I decided not to take it. Upon touching down in Tibet, I felt a bit out of breath shortly after getting off the plane. Getting my luggage off the conveyor belt was like jogging for 1-2KM distance.

I didn’t have any altitude sickness symptoms until when I was in my room around 9PM. My head started to feel tight and uncomfortable. In awhile, I started to have migraine around my temples area. The headache became more severe as time past but Ben, my roommate, was snoring away on the other bed. I was like why so much difference lar…. I have headache and worst I can’t fall asleep although I’m tired. I couldn’t take it anymore, I popped 2 panadols and a Acetazolamide to help ease the suffering. Felt a bit disappointed that I need to rely on medication to overcome altitude sickness. The panadols soothes my headache slightly but still have tingly feeling and cannot go to sleep.

Around 2AM in the morning, my headache suddenly subsided and I finally could fall asleep. Felt like I just switch on high altitude mode and it felt normal again. I went to sleep after that. The next day, I woke up fresh and no headache at all ready to explore the the beauty of Tibet. Over the few days in Tibet, I took Acetazolamide pill each morning and night and never felt any recurrence of headache at all. Some of my group members still had some symptoms the next day. They had headache , feeling nautious and vomited.

Somehow our breathing system will be short circuited when in high altitude, our auto breathing system will not function properly, during the day, we can consciously breath ourself but not while sleeping at night. We can actually stop breathing while asleep up until 15 seconds and start breathing again profusely. I felt this symptom as well while sleeping, I stopped breathing for a short while and woke up feeling suffocated.

I tried jogging during the last day before I leave Tibet, and I almost died! I ran for around 200 meters and it felt like I had ran few KMs in full speed.

I really enjoyed the experience there.

Share on Facebook

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.