As a sequel to my Italy trip last year with my friends Tom and Tracy, the three of us visited France last week. On Wednesday, we visited Sauternais to sample that region’s sweet white wines.

They’re made from grapes infected with something called “noble rot,” a happy accident that shrivels them into highly concentrated near-raisins. We spent the day tasting intense and complex wines, detecting notes of apricot, pear, pineapple, and honey – and when we got better at it, white pepper, black tea, and smoke.

They’re beautiful wines. They catch the sunlight and glow, warm and golden.

Afterward, we headed to an evening market in Monségur, a small town with a bustling square surrounded by shops and food stalls. It was here I began the worst night I have ever spent on vacation.

I’ve written here about my tendency to get a hunk of food stuck painfully behind my sternum when I don’t chew thoroughly enough. I’ve always been able to wait it out while it works itself into my stomach, after which I am fine.

It turned out that my friend Brian had experienced this himself, and he recognized it as gastroesophageal reflux disease, or “GERD.” He told me he was on medication for it.

“You may want to check on it,” he said, “because if untreated, it could potentially become cancerous.”

That seemed a little dramatic. I shrugged it off.

In Monségur, I sat down with Tom and Tracy, each of us with a big plate of roasted pork, beans, and potatoes covered in peppercorn sauce. Soon came the telltale esophagus pain.

It was mild, so I stretched and waited for it to pass. But soon I realized it was going to take more work, so I excused myself to wander around the square.

Almost imperceptibly, the pain deepened from a mild episode to one of my worst. I slipped behind a stone archway to work through it in peace. Hiccups began, which was not unusual, but they were quickly followed by regurgitation.

That had never happened before.

To make matters worse, the one napkin I happened to have was not up to the task.

I made my way back to the pork stand with one hand over my face and reached through the line of customers to grab a handful of napkins. I then wandered down one of the streets to find a more secluded area. Soon, I doubled over and vomited again. I head Tom’s voice behind me:

“Do you want to get in the car?”

“Yeah. Where is it?”

“Right here.”

Like a spawning salmon, I’d instinctively made my way back to the intersection where we’d parked.

He let me in, and I told him I just needed to be alone for a while. I sat in the back seat, nursing my aching esophagus and occasionally vomiting out the door. I watched dusk approach.

I had exhausted my napkins, so I removed my t-shirt from under my Hawaiian shirt. Luckily, Tom and Tracy interrupted me when they returned bearing more napkins and a plastic bag. Still thinking I’d be fine, I told them to return to the market while I recovered.

I watched the street get dark. Visitors occasionally walked past the car toward the square. People in homes on both sides of the street, perhaps because of me, drew their shutters closed. Live music reached me from the market. And I vomited and vomited, dwelling on how miserable and surreal the whole experience was.

Tom and Tracy returned to the car. I told them I wanted to see a doctor.

They are magnificent friends. They headed back to the crowd and asked where the closest emergency room was – it was in nearby La Réole. We took off, and they told me not to feel embarrassed about occasionally thrusting my face into the plastic bag.

We arrived at the hospital at 9:30, but the emergency room had closed at 8:00. A night nurse told us the nearest place we could go was in Langon, some 20 kilometers away. She offered to call an ambulance, but warned that there were only a handful in the region, and it would take 20 minutes for it to arrive. We drove instead.

We entered the hospital past a thin young man with a bandage over his eye and dried blood streaking down his face. We managed to convey to the receptionist that I needed an English-speaking doctor. There were two. One of them emerged, a cadaverous man who stared through me as I attempted to explain the history of my problem and why this episode was different.

The doctor and I reached an uneasy equilibrium, in which neither of us seemed particularly heartened, and I sat in the waiting area. Everyone stared at me, this worried American tourist in the Hawaiian shirt, this man who spoke no French and carried a bulky plastic bag poorly camouflaged inside an undershirt.

Between trips to the washroom, I borrowed Tracy’s cell phone to call my insurance provider back in the States. I got hold of an operator.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m in France–”

“Oh!” she said delightedly.

“–and I can’t stop throwing up.”

It was reassuring to hear that anything I was covered for in the U.S. was covered in Europe as well – I just had to file for reimbursement when I got back home. Fine, but I had no idea what kind of charges I’d be ringing up. A few Euros? Hundreds? Thousands? Should I be optimistic or pessimistic that I was a U.S. citizen with U.S. insurance in France?

Time oozed by. I was just finishing up a session in the restroom when I heard the nurse: “Monsieur Stintoñ?”

I was led, alone, to a room and told to lie down on a bed. It was the first time I’d managed to recline since the ordeal started. It felt okay. I think I managed not to vomit while I waited. I also hoped I’d get the other English-speaking doctor.

I was oddly calm, probably because I had at least arrived at this point, beyond the square in Monségur, beyond the darkening car, the swerving trip to the hospitals and the waiting room full of injured Frenchmen. The next stop was treatment.

I was crestfallen to see the same cadaverous doctor enter the room, until I realized this was a different cadaverous doctor, one who was far more friendly and responsive.

“’Allo,” he said.

We managed to communicate through his imperfect English and my nearly nonexistent French. He asked pertinent questions and seemed to recognize logic in my answers.

He asked me if I was stressed.

“A little,” I said. (Yes.)

“I think you have, uh... I’m not sure the word in English.” He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Is hole, small hole in stomach.”

“Ulcer?” I asked.

“Oui! Ool-sah.”

He lifted my Hawaiian shirt. “You speak good English for an American boy,” he told me.

“Merci,” I said.

We had a good laugh, and he poked my ulcer. “It hurts here?”

Here’s European medicine for you: He prescribed Nexium and suggested that I look into tai chi. I thanked him and made my way back to the waiting room, stopping only to spew vomit all over the closed lid of a toilet.

There, on my knees in the bathroom of a hospital waiting room in a foreign country, wiping up a volume of my own spew from the wall and floor with a few thin scraps of toilet paper in the middle of the night, I reflected on how happily I would have traded it to be back in Chicago, depressed but relatively healthy in my cubicle, where at that moment I’d be getting ready to leave work and head home.

I stopped at the desk and asked the receptionist, “Do I pay now?”

“No!” she replied. “No pay.” I nearly wept.

Back at our accommodations, I settled in for a long night of vomiting. Every once in a while, panicked about dehydration, I’d try a sip of water, but my body rejected everything I sent down and more.

It was painful to think that, in 12 hours, I’d gone from inhaling deeply from a glass of Sauternes to praying that I’d be able to successfully swallow water.

Finally, I watched the dawn turn the sky from black to blue to sunny yellow. Cautious optimism took hold. Gingerly, I sat up in bed and drank some water, just enough to coat my tongue. It was the first thing I kept down since I dug into that meal in Monségur.

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