A much-belated return to the Antarctic Blog. This was originally written for my Patreon in December, 2020. This post contains frank details of an upper respiratory viral infection. If you are grossed out by such things, or if you want to look crème pâtissiere in the face again, please click away now.
McMurdo has a secret.
A secret they don't want you to know.
A secret that is kept out of the documentaries and the media reports and the funny little personal videos about life at the bottom of the world.
There is a beast that lurks in the corridors, passes unseen through the Galley, can follow you out to a field camp, or come find you safe and warm in your dorm. You won't know it's close until it's got you. People will swear by magic spells, potions, and rituals that keep it away, or alleviate the suffering, but there is no stopping fate, and fate goes by the name of ...
THE CRUD.
According to the multi-year veteran dish-washer I met over dinner one evening, The Crud is a cold virus that's endemic to McMurdo. It gets passed from cohort to cohort, year on year, and has evolved into its own thing. The CDC even sent someone to investigate it once.
I don't know how much of that is true, but it is certainly impossible to escape the presence of The Crud. It's required to wash one's hands before entering the Galley, and there is a bottle of hand sanitiser on every table. The McMurdo shop, which is just around the corner in the same building as the Galley, does brisk business selling pharmaceuticals to those who've been afflicted – in fact, along with souvenirs, beer, and cartons of UHT milk, decongestants seem to be their main line of business. Everyone must show proof of having the most recent flu vaccine before they can get on the plane to Antarctica, but there is no vaccine against The Crud, so it's a dependable return on investment.
Looking back on The Crud from the other side of 2020 is amusing. On one hand, ubiquitous hand washing and alcohol gel are no longer quirks of McMurdo but part of eveyone's life. On the other, it's a little comical that there was such paranoia in the Galley, but nowhere else. I'm pretty sure I caught The Crud at a science lecture in the library, where upwards of 50 people were crammed together in a smallish, poorly-ventilated room for over an hour, with nary a sanitiser pump to be seen – or a face mask, which would probably have been more effective.
I can confirm that it was not like any other cold I'd ever had. I am no stranger to the seasonal rhinovirus, and have made a lifelong study of its variations. The Crud started as colds usually do, with a tiny but persistent irritation high up in my nasal passages and a general sense of inflammation. However, instead of taking the usual track through sneezing, running, stuffiness, and a lingering cough, it turned quickly into a head full of crème pâtissiere and stayed there, unmoving, for days.
Being a regular sufferer, I have devised a strategy that gets me through the average cold: At first sign, slam it with a proven cocktail of herbs and vitamins, drink as much water as you can swallow, and look after your sleep. If that fails, sleep as much as possible in the first 36 hours, be assiduous with decongestants and anti-inflammatory nasal spray, and suck down hot mulled ginger lemonade until it goes away. Once upon a time I believed in medicating and soldiering through, which gave me ten days of a bad cold and a month of cough. With the new strategy, which I like to call Looking After Myself, I am usually over it in a week and sometimes don't even get a cough at all.
I have a small anti-cold kit in my travelling toiletries bag – one never knows! – but the preventatives were useless in this case, and the decongestants not much better. I spent an entire day in bed, early on, but all that achieved was wasting one of my precious limited Antarctic days. The only thing that seemed to do any good at all was the anti-inflammatory spray, which opened enough of a pathway through the crème pâtissiere that I didn't have to breathe through my mouth all the time.
Sometimes you get an untreatable cold, and just have to make the best of it. This was by no means the most miserable one I'd had, and the lack of a runny nose was a notable relief. But I did miss having access to a kitchen: Normally I'd bung the lemon, ginger, honey and spices in a giant teapot and simmer it on the warmer until mulled into a soup to make a medieval chef weep, but the best I could manage in the McMurdo galley was to put some cinnamon powder in a mug of apple juice and nuke it. It was comforting, and cleared me slightly for a few minutes after drinking it, but wasn't nearly as effective.
The most bothersome thing about The Crud was the fatigue. I had been going pretty hard for a few weeks so I definitely needed to catch up on my rest, but I never seemed to be able to get enough. Part of this was not getting proper sleep when I did lie down, on account of the crème pâtissiere threatening to smother me. I didn't have the brain fog that comes with illness, but the sleep deprivation began to make up for it. On top of that was the frustration of seeing my precious Antarctic time slipping away and not having the wherewithal to take hold of it. Day after day I sorted photos and caught up on my journal and watched the sun wheel away my remaining hours. Another day of taking it easy should see me right ... maybe one more ... must be almost over it now ...
I had been scheduled to talk at Scott Base about five days after the Crud hit. I felt like I was starting to get over it, but they insisted I postpone – a wise choice, because it was back as bad as ever the next day. By the time the new date came around I was feeling a lot better. My voice was starting to go a bit croaky, but I was pretty sure I could last the night, and the fatigue had mostly gone. I was still stuffy, but my head didn't feel like a stopped-up piping bag. I went, I talked, I chatted with some fascinating and excellent New Zealanders, and then, sometime in the night, my voice died.
Now, I get colds a lot, and am familiar with the range of knock-on effects. Sometimes I sound like a smoker, but I have never lost my voice. The worst I've done to it was overdo a talk at my old school, which left it weak and tender for a few days after, but it wasn't gone. This, however, felt like someone had replaced my vocal cords with erasers – the best I could manage was a rubbery squeak. I had always wondered, as a child, why Ariel didn't simply whisper when Ursula took her voice, but it turns out that whispering requires healthy vocal cords as much as speaking does. My vocal communication was kaput.
This was not, it turned out, because of the speaking engagement, or indeed the Crud, at least not directly. One of the station doctors said that there were two diseases going around that season: the Crud, as expected, but also a viral laryngitis. Some people got one and not the other; sometimes getting one would weaken your resistance so you'd end up catching both. My roommate had brought the laryngitis back from her field camp when I was down with the Crud so I'm pretty sure I caught it off her, though it could have been anyone as it was pretty rampant.
The laryngitis did lead to a funny souvenir of the trip, though. Prior to catching it, I had promised my booze ration to a farewell party being thrown by the One Strange Rock crew, and though I was now useless as a party attendee I thought I could at least drop it off with a smile and wave. This I did, but on the way out got stopped by one of my Crary labmates, a super cool marine biologist who wanted to talk to me about the marine biology on the historic expeditions. I am always down to talk, but literally couldn't, so resorted to typing my responses in my phone while she said her part out loud. As a result, I have a little fossilised one-sided conversation, so if you were curious what it's like to talk with me, this is pretty much it:
My vocal cords were finally released just in time to do the BBC interview in the Discovery Hut. The Crud was about 60% gone by then, but its remnants held on well into my trip home. The doctor mentioned above had recommended the Christchurch Botanic Gardens as a surefire cure, but alas they had little effect. As usual, it was time and rest that finally saw to it.
I can't pretend I'm not resentful of the time lost, though I had done so much in such a short time before then, that it may have just balanced things out. At the time, my consolation was that I was getting the Full McMurdo Experience: what kind of visit would it have been if I hadn't got the Crud? This was tarnished rather when I arrived back in LA and discovered that, while I was gone, my sister's whole family had suffered through exactly the same cludgy, hard-to-shift cold. So much for the unique virus endemic to Antarctica.
From here, in the midst of a respiratory pandemic, it's an interesting experience to look back on. Obviously, it would have made some difference to take the same sort of precautions outside the Galley as in. One could also argue that the extremely dry air aided transmission and made the symptoms worse. Hydration was practically a religion at McMurdo but the air was fantastically dry, and the body can only replenish the mucus membranes so fast. I am pretty sure that the 60-hour-week was a much more significant factor than station leadership would like to consider. Scott Base, just over the hill, didn't seem to be nearly as badly affected, despite a fair amount of interfacing with the Americans, including some hardcore mingling at Thanksgiving. In my past life, crunch time on a film, which tended to have a similar schedule, was always bad for diseases, and that was without the physical demands of life in Antarctica. Later in the season, after I left, a strain of flu that was not covered by the jab tore through the station, taking people out for two weeks or more. It's easy to see how they could be so vulnerable, and why the Powers That Be are so very concerned about keeping Covid-19 out of Antarctica.
I had finally beaten the Crud when I arrived home on Christmas Eve, but Boxing Day I caught another bad cold, and had a further two before everything locked down in March. Even with my history of susceptibility that was a lot of colds, and is probably not unrelated to two months of solid, exhausting travel. I've been very careful not to put myself at risk of catching Covid-19, knowing how respiratory things tend to go with me, and as such have not caught anything else, either. I do wonder how things are different this year at McMurdo, where the population is less than half what it was last year and contagious disease is at the top of everyone's mind. Have their precautions beat the Crud as well? Or has it been lurking in half-abandoned corners waiting for an unsuspecting human host to awaken it?
At any rate, now you know. It's one the conspiracy theorists could never have imagined.
