Constipated or constipada: It’s Not the Same!

September came and went in a flurried frenzy! It's easy to compare its arrival to waking up from a dream with a bucket of cold water thrown on your sun-soaked, August body.

Darcie on her 42 day of walking El Camino de Levante… looking about the same as last weekend. Photo by Camino friend, Katrina.

Here at the academy, September is our month of coordinating and accommodating: matching parents with afterschool schedules filled with sports, music, dance… and of course, English! Lives are modified, groups are formed and tweaked, alliances made and broken — all because of fencing class. It's glorious madness. And then comes October.

Everything begins to settle. I sneak in a deep breath.

But just as I started to exhale… I got sick. Like really sick. Vomiting-all-night sick. Head-pounding, stomach-churning, blanket-on-the-couch, staggering-to-the-bathroom kind of sick.

Since I couldn’t watch Netflix, read, or even scroll, I had no choice but to reflect. And I started thinking about how differently illness is handled in Spain vs. the U.S. Here in Spain, taking time off to rest is normal. There’s no shame in it. Health care? Covered. Sick days? Expected. In the U.S.? Not so much.

Deep down, I felt like a failure for being ill— I was wasting a whole day, for heaven’s sake. In the U.S., we treat illness like an inconvenience or even a weakness. In Spain, it's a condition — and you are told, with full conviction:

“¡Quédate en casa!” (Stay home!)

Just then, Leti, my Spanish friend called to check in on me.

 “¿Qué tal? ¿Estás constipada?”, she asked.

Now, I knew she meant "Do you have a cold?", but for us English speakers, that sounded like quite the personal question! For the record, I was neither constipada nor constipated. In fact, things were… moving rather efficiently in both directions, thank you very much. Definitely not a common cold — this was a full-blown virus.

We laughed about the mix-up, and it made me think: the words we use — and how we treat illness — reflect our cultural values. In Spain, getting sick is part of being human. In the U.S., it can feel like you're doing something wrong.

Maybe the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle — a little Spanish-style rest, a little American-style grit... and ideally, no mistranslations in the bathroom department.