The things that happened at Mardi Gras
Emergency Room, Poison Control, and surrendering. A celebration of the ridiculous joy of living with loads of photos!
Greetings from New Orleans,
I’m sitting in the airport feeling relieved, reflective, and a little tired. It’s been quite a week.
My strongest desire and intention is to convey this: I didn’t know that experiencing Mardi Gras in New Orleans was important, but now I understand. I want to tell you that if you ever have the chance, it’s a thing of beauty and wonder and totally worth it.
But friends, my week-long vacation without my children or husband included a trip to the ER, a call with Poison Control in the wee hours of the morning, and nearly passing out from the fear that I was going blind. It was a lot.
Let me start by setting the stage: Molli is a former New Orleanian who decided to return to the city she loves for the Mardi Gras season. She sent an invitation, and a google spreadsheet, to her girlfriends. The flat she’d rented in the French Quarter had a classic wrought iron balcony, was a block from the river and Cafe du Monde, and there were three bedrooms. Each had its own bathroom. She wanted to surround herself with friends for her 55th birthday! It was a fantastic invitation to receive, but by the time I nabbed a slot, all that was left was the actual week leading up to Mardi Gras. I love New Orleans, but I was not sure I needed that week. However, I am intrigued by the fact that Carnival is celebrated around the world in a myriad of ways and I do love costumes. It was an invitation too good to ignore. So I got excited.
Fears
It might seem strange to mention this, but my father-in-law currently has a terrible case of shingles. The women on my side of the family have also suffered through shingles and it’s all given me the impression that it’s the absolute worst. I’m forty-nine years old so I’ve been talking about how much a look forward to getting the vaccine when I turn fifty.
How’s that for foreshadowing? I woke up on the first morning in the beautiful French Quarter with an ear ache and swollen lymph nodes in my neck. I figured air travel and the cold running through my house back home were the culprits.
The next morning, I had a swollen eye. I took some Ibuprofen and didn’t think too much of it. But that night I downloaded a virtual doctor app, hoping I wouldn’t have to use it. The app didn’t get me far, but a call to the trusty nurse hotline the next morning set things in motion. Turns out when you mention the eye area, they take it seriously.
Un-American Urgent Care
We walked to the Marigny neighborhood to find an independent health clinic that was nothing like what I think of as American health care, but that’s not a criticism. This clinic occupied a lovely single-story house with wooden siding and a wrap-around porch. The waiting room had dark, polished wood floors and the receptionist wore beads over her shirt, which was a casual polo striped in the colors of the season: purple, green and gold.
I sat in real furniture for less than 15 minutes before being taken back to a bedroom furnished with a porcelain pedestal bathroom sink and a sturdy wooden table with padding on top, which was covered in clean, white paper. The doctor looked me deep in the eyes and told me I had to go to the Emergency Room immediately. She told me the shot of steroids she was about to stick in my ass would cost me $20. She then wrote a prescription for pain meds and antivirals before re-emphasizing her medical responsibility to convey the seriousness of my situation. She wrote down the name of the ER where an ophthalmologist was on call.
My scalp had started tingling at a parade called Muses. It was my first night out in a wig in New Orleans. Muses follows Chaos. The floats of Chaos were filled with men in complete face masks, which was creepy, but Muses’ floats carried beautiful people on remarkable rolling sculptures that looked like landscapes for Greek goddesses or scenes of modern self-care with a sense of humor: a bathtub, a line of rubber ducks, a seventeen-foot-tall shoe that lit up the night sky.
The Krewe of Muses are known to have ‘useful’ throws. I personally caught a blaze-orange hat, some tube socks, and a duck-shaped chip clip, all ‘branded’ Muses. These delights are pitched from on high into the eager arms of excited spectators, many of whom have been waiting for hours in camps like those set up by families at my daughter’s swim meets. Coolers and wagons and folding chairs with cup holders. The most coveted throw at the Muses parade is an ornately decorated shoe.
They call that Herpes Zoster.
The cashier at Walgreens behind the pharmacy county handed over the meds and I took my first antiviral pill on the way to the ER. Lucky for me, my friend Molli is not only a fan of Mardi Gras, she is also the most reasonable, reliable, and steady friend a girl could have. The thought of going to ER during the week of Mardi Gras freaked us both out, but she kept her cool.
Molli is a full-time traveler who lives out of her camper van. She’d left it in a parking lot in New Orleans for the month and had been living in the AirBNB flat in the French Quarter. But Oschner Hospital, where we had to go to find an emergency ophthalmologist, is in Jefferson, Louisiana, which is outside the city limits of New Orleans. We needed a vehicle. So she got the van out of storage, and some Cajun-style lunch for us, and we geared up for the adventure.
But fair’s fair: If you can avoid the ER, that’s clearly the right choice. Molli dropped me at the door and rolled away to wait in her house-on-wheels. She handed me a chocolate Hubig’s hand pie for good luck.
I am not terrible when it comes to handling uncertainties like this. I can go with the flow. I’m a pretty chill traveler, especially with no kids to care for, just myself to worry about. But by now I was getting nervous.
The ER doc was terrifying.
I was told that Herpes Zoster was attacking my V1 nerve, meaning the shingles were presenting on the right side of my scalp, forehead, right eye and nose. This results in excruciating pain and blindness.
“It’s ten out of ten pain,” the ER doctor said frankly.
To illustrate my situation, the doctor turned her computer screen toward me and scrolled through photo after photo of faces eaten alive with open sores. Every eye on her screen was nearly swollen shut.
“Your eye will be angry,” she explained, “and there will be no doubt of what you are feeling. You should come straight back to the ER,” she said. When the pain comes, “you walk right through this door.”
I must have gone pale. I broke into a cold sweat.
The doctor walked over to recline the back of the table I was sitting on. “I don’t want you to faint,” she said, then left the room to fetch the eye test.
The voice in my head was trying to say reassuring things, like: You can survive this. It’s just the one eye. Glass eyes are cool.
A simple test concluded I was not yet going blind. It consisted of putting drops of yellow fluid into my eye, then staring into a set of blue lights the doctor held over my head. She was searching for virus attacking my eyeball, which would be marked by the yellow dye.
Nothing. Yet.
“You will know.” A ten out of ten pain, I remembered her saying. But she said it again for emphasis.
Then what? I wondered. She had shifted focus from my eye to the drugs. My script from urgent care was for 5 days: two pills to be taken twice a day. She scoffed and doubled the dosage, telling me to take the pills more frequently and for longer: every eight hours for ten days. She instructed me to take another pill immediately, while I drove to Walgreens to get more. “Set your phone alarm,” she ordered.
“So I have to go home,” I said. I wasn't asking, just processing aloud. “I’m supposed to be here through Mardi Gras.”
She looked at me then and said the calmest, nicest thing she’d said yet. “No. You are only contagious if you touch your face. You can still walk in the parades.”
And that was it.
Back at the rental flat, I called my husband, who is a smart and helpful chemist and he immediately asked why I didn’t have this antiviral eye drop on hand since it would clearly be impossible to get through parade traffic and street closures when the pain hit. Shoot. I didn’t think of that.
I called the number on my discharge slip and got another ER doc on the line. I explained my situation. I told her I was planning to go home so that I could be with my family to deal with the immanent disaster of unbearable pain and vision loss.
She listened, then stated quite frankly, in her professional opinion, that I could probably make it until after Mardi Gras. She elaborated, “You can still walk in the parades.”
The same final analysis from two ER doctors. Mardi Gras trumps all the rest.
Overdose.
That night, I set my alarm for 2AM. I put the pill bottle and a water bottle next to the bed for my third dose of antivirals.
I woke up just before the alarm went off and downed two pills. As I lay there trying to fall back asleep it suddenly occurred to me: I’d taken two of the new pills, which was actually a double dose. 2000 milligrams instead of 1000.
The ER doc had been so irritated with me for only taking one pill after leaving urgent care, half of her prescribed dosage. Somehow I hadn’t noticed that the new prescription was double strength packed into just one large blue pill. Unlike at home, at the Walgreens in New Orleans I had not interacted with an actual pharmacist. The cashier handed me a bag when I paid. No advice was given about taking my pills with food or on any empty stomach, nor was I warned not to operate a vehicle or make important decisions while on the pain meds. They are sedatives.
The doc had been so severe with her edict to set my alarm that I figured I better get clear about how to get back on track. Well, it turns out that when you call to tell the ER nurse that you’ve taken too many pills in the middle of the night in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, you are quickly shuttled over to Poison Control.
They call that a Mardi Gras Miracle.
Many times during the week I was in New Orleans, I heard people talk about Mardi Gras miracles.
I kept taking the pills, and somehow, I’m fine. I still have two functional eyes that gawked at a zillion zany costumes. There was boisterous creativity around every corner that made my heart sing. The unabashed beauty on display over the next few days was healing in a way I had not realized I needed.
I am a Yes Please, glass half-full, let’s do this traveler! I love to soak it up. So as the days went on, I tried not to touch my eye or my face, I tried not to worry, I tried to relax. I popped into the Chinese Massage shops on every corner of the French Quarter and soaked at The Country Club pool. I tried varieties of King Cake and dressed up in shiny clothing and walked in parades. I sat in the sunshine on the wrought iron balcony and listened to the music of the world go by.
And I told myself: hey, this isn’t so bad. Maybe it’s actually a gift to get shingles at age forty-nine. It’s good to get it over with, right? So what if I couldn’t wear a wig. I was otherwise not all that uncomfortable.
The day before Mardi Gras is called Lundi Gras. We joined up with a parade of Grannies at the bar on the corner by our flat. I had a good laugh about my shingles with a few of the beautiful old crones handing out hard candies and homemade Golden Ghouls buttons.
But one of those grannies, dressed in a muumuu and peace beads, was a doctor. She nodded knowingly and said, “and now every time you get shingles, it will be on the V1 nerve.”
Every time? Every time!
I feel a little shameful about the shingles. Shingles, they say, come out when you are stressed out, or your immune system is weak, or your body is ailing. I have been asking myself: Why did I get shingles? Why now?
I have two thoughts: One is that Mardi Gras is a celebration of life, of the joy of living, and an invitation to accept the uncertainty in this wildly mixed up world with a shrug and a smile.
It’s a party, yes, and it’s a display of everything real about living in a body, living with a brain wired for creativity, living in a world mapped with absurd extremes, and living on the edge every single day, whether we believe it or not.
Living in a body is not always pretty. Mardi Gras was a great place to get over my shame and get over myself.
Two: Life is stressful. I’m not immune. There is no way to be alive in 2024 and not feel the weight of this stressful life we’ve created. And so I’m saying a big thank you to my body for giving me a mild, gentle reminder to breath deeply using my diaphragm all day long. Walk around, be in the fresh air, enjoy the seasons, smile, relax my body and my mind. Eat well, regularly. Sleep well, regularly. And get away from the screens to be present with the people and plants and dirt and water and stories that I care about.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I love this Wanderlife project, but I will be spacing out the newsletters a bit more in the future. Let’s wander around more and stare into screens less, ok?
Thanks for reading and for being here. And please keep scrolling to see loads more photos!
PS: I’ve been told that glitter will be found in every nook and cranny after Mardi Gras. It will pop up for months … behind the ear, in the pit of the knee, in the corner of an eye. They call that Mardi Gras Herpes.
Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a carnival like nothing I’ve seen before. I’m delighted to share a rash of beautiful photos below, hoping the inspiration is contagious.
We got up early to find the Skull and Bones Gang, who wake up the Treme neighborhood on Mardi Gras, reminding people that you can sleep when you’re dead. The tradition dates back to 1819 with roots in African spirituality. At 5AM The Little People’s Place bar was open, with a heat lamp out front and music to welcome people there to watch the opening ritual, an invitation to honor Black history and all our ancestors. I shared some additional photos of this on my Instagram and someone I don’t know commented to explain that “the Mystic Seven Sisters have revived an over 300 year tradition of women blessing the streets early morning.” It was a really special way to start the day.
The Society of St. Anne take over the streets of the Marigny neighborhood on Mardi Gras morning in elaborate handmade costumes. This is a walking krewe of mostly locals, including many of Molli's friends.
The promenade along Moonwalk Riverfront Park just across the streetcar tracks from Jackson Park (French Quarter) was my favorite. The sun was out and there were dance parties rolling along. It was such a happy, positive vibe!
Absolutely loved this post! NOLA! At Mardi Gras. Oh man, you had the full monte for it though. Do love that you guys stopped for Cajun enroute to the ER. Made me laugh. Yrs ago flying to MX there was a connection in NOLA enroute to Cancun. We asked if we could jump off, and board for MX connection the next day. Continental said no problema. We got to know NOLA pretty well and have loved it since. Have friends there too so that makes it more special. Also love how in diners the waitresses call you 'Sugar;' you can't find a bad meal if you try; and hotel clerks tell you outlandish tales like how the price of oysters drops to half at Thanksgiving b.c everyone makes their dressing w. oysters (yum). What a time you had!! With a story to tell, the best times of all.
What a wonderful story and an incredible experience. But also terrifying. I’m glad we knew you were Ok before I read this.
You are an amazing photographer. Thank you for sharing the joy!