When you genuinely believe you are about to die, you have some funny thoughts.
One day in 2015, I was in my favourite restaurant in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Surfer's Paradise. A tiny shop owned by an Australian couple next to the hostel I was living at. I was listening to Tom, an english fellow who taught english virtually, describing the site he was hoping to build to advertise his services to a wider audience and develop a product offering; I was having a bit of trouble focussing. I asked him for a second time how he currently found new students. Except, what I actually said was probably gibberish.
"Matt, are you okay?"
Dianna, the woman who owned the bar had walked over to our table as I woke up suddenly from my mid-meeting nap.
I hadn't told a soul how sick I felt - had felt for over a week now. How my diarrhea had stopped only because I was too dehydrated to generate new fluids and I hadn't eaten properly in days. I was convinced it was terminal.
Dianna took one look at me and immediately knew what was wrong.
"You need to get yourself over to KSK mall and tell them you have a stomach infection."
"I can't afford it", I looked down in shame. My travel insurance had expired the month before and I was down to 2500 Baht. Barely enough for my hostel and food. I'd heard about the travellers with no insurance, left thousands in debt to a hospital with no way to pay.
"Sure you can! I went last week and it cost 100 Baht."
I stared at her, dumbfounded.
Shortly after, I stumbled less than 20 minutes down the street to Kad Suan Kaew shopping mall where I found the pharmacist on the bottom floor, and anxiously tried to explain my symptoms to him.
He stopped me, and said, "Your stomach. It feels like shit?"
I nodded, and within minutes he gave me a bottle with a few pills and instructed me to take one a day for the next few days, and to drink lots of water.
By the next afternoon, I felt some relief as my insides absorbed liquid for the first time in days. By the next day, I felt almost entirely better.
I'm pretty sure all he gave me was Imodium - Where was I going with this? Oh yeah:
In what I believed to be my final days I wrote furiously in my journal
Not emotional reflection, but trying to figure out a solution.
Sales plans, urging myself to do more work. To make the money to get by. Potential prospects and clients who owed me money that maybe one more invoice reminder would turn around.
And the kicker: A pseudo-business idea to "scratch my own itch" - A script for travellers that would require you to check-in every week otherwise it would send a personally written letter to your loved ones informing them that you've mostly likely passed away in some distant country.
The MVP? A scheduled email that I would turn off each Monday with instructions on how to recover my body.
What's the moral here?
I should have stopped reading so much Gary Vee and "hustling", and maybe taken a break from sales when I thought I was going to die.
Or maybe the work kept me going. I'll tell ya, this journal is pretty optimistic for a guy with less than $120 to his name and a severe case of dysentery.