Sick While Abroad: How I Managed

Last week, I experienced a sharp inflection point in my semester abroad. I had just returned from my winter break, during which I had the rare opportunity to visit Brussels, Marseille, and St. Nazaire in the same week. This had been the highlight of my abroad experience up until that point, and I was looking forward to returning to the IES Abroad center and getting a head start studying for my exams. 

I had felt fine the morning on Monday when we resumed classes, but as it got closer to 5 p.m., I started to feel a bit nauseous. I figured that it was perhaps from something that I had eaten, and that I would feel better later on.

When I went to take the bus back to my host’s residence (about a 25-minute commute), I almost immediately found that the bus made me feel more sick, and I had to get off after the next stop. At that point, I realized that I could not ride in a car or bus without being sick, and that I needed to continue on foot.

The walk back took much longer than usual, and despite taking multiple breaks, I could not avoid being sick a few times along the side of the road. At that point, I knew that I had some sort of virus that was just materializing. 

When I finally did make it to my host’s house, I told him that I felt too ill to have dinner and that I needed to go to bed. That night was particularly difficult, as I was kept awake by the need to be sick multiple times, and it was not until about 4 a.m. that I was finally able to sleep after having looked up the proper sleep position for a stomach virus (on the left side with the upper body elevated).

The next day I was still too ill to attend class. After getting up late, I called the center to let them know the situation. They gave me the location of a nearby pharmacy.

I did not feel well enough to leave the house, so I ordered some crackers from the grocery store via Uber Eats, which I was not able to eat until later that night.

It was not until that Thursday that I was able to attend my teaching internship, and finally go to the pharmacy.

Pharmacies in France are different from those in the U.S., as they carry exclusively medicine and medical supplies, and are able to prescribe certain medications to customers. These are mostly natural, plant-based tablets, which is what the pharmacists recommended that I take.

These helped a bit to eat, though I mainly needed to rest, and was not fully better until that Sunday.

This was clearly the low-point of my semester abroad and I felt rather depressed during that week. Falling ill while abroad was not something I had not really considered beforehand, and being a guest in someone else’s house made the experience much more onerous. It helps to have some generic medication like painkillers and antacids at the ready for when symptoms begin. 

Getting sick is never convenient —particularly for a student. Making use of my network through IES Abroad and being aware of local resources has made the experience a bit more manageable.