Sorry I'm Late - I was in snowy Finland trying not to get a UTI

the most wonderful time of the year

I am in Finland, crunching through the snow and looking at Christmas lights and trying to keep my beanie on as snow falls on my eyelashes. I walk into the Helsinki Christmas market and suddenly I am inside of Christmas with twinkle lights, mulled wine and vendors selling roasted nuts and snow – so much snow on the ground that it lights up the sky and tiny flakes cover my coat.

When I landed the evening before, in darkness, I saw the words “Helsinki Airport” appear through the fog as the plane taxied to the runway. I suddenly realised how alone I was, how far away from home I was, how close to Russia I was. For a moment, I thought, “What have I done?”

It is the exact same feeling I had in my stomach when I landed in Beijing in summer when I was 22, having decided to move there without knowing the language or having a job or a plan.

I recently read about a British woman, Preet Chandi, who pulled a sled 900 miles through Antarctica alone through 60mph winds. She’d walk 13-15 hours a day and melt snow at night for drinking water. It took her six weeks to untangle her hair after she returned home.

God, I enjoy stories like these greatly, and not just for the pure delight in not doing that very hard painful thing, but because they make me feel less insane for the things I sometimes do, like looking for witches in Northern England at twilight on Halloween or convincing a farmer to let me shear one of his sheep in New Zealand. I often don’t even know why I do these things – I just feel compelled to do them.

I can’t imagine the Antarctica woman had a super-solid answer for why she was doing it either.  Other than, like “I just really wanted to do it and see what happens…” I mean, sure, the “hero” and “role model” stuff comes after but I’m sure most of the people in her life at the time were like, “What in fresh hell, Preet? You want to drag a 260lb (120kg) sled across Antarctica alone for 70 days just…because…?”

That’s the best way I can explain why I flew to Sweden and then Finland alone in mid-December when it was -9 degrees Celcius and heavily snowing. I had bought heat-tech long underwear and gloves, but somehow forgot a scarf. I had also completely packed the wrong shoes, so the first thing I had to do when I landed in Helsinki was crunch through a mile of snow in my sneakers to an outdoors shop and buy a pair of winter hiking boots from a rugged man named Walter, which of course made me think of Walter from the bookshop.

For my travels to the Nordic countries, I had made a mistake graver than only packing trainers. I had brought the wrong books with me – two books by the same author who I had never read before – huge, rookie mistake. Holiday reading is the best of all reading and to screw this up so fantastically was making me grumpy. I disliked the two books I brought so much that I left them in Finland. I won’t say who the author was, but it meant that I had to immediately find a bookshop to correct my wrongs (I will say that the author is dead so if you’re reading this, it’s not you. I love you. All of your writing is very good).

I searched the Copenhagen Airport (where I was flying in and out of from London) and there was no bookshop in my terminal, just very beautiful clothing and personalised phone chargers for sale and beautiful tins of tea, including one called Mermaid Tea, inspired by Hans Christian Anderson, that as far as I can tell was green tea with some seaweed sprinkled in.

When I finally found a bookshop that sold English books, it was attached to a Starbucks. I never go to Starbucks in London and rarely in America except in smaller towns, but for some reason, when I’m abroad, it calls to me. I realise this probably makes me the same as someone who eats at McDonalds on their one night in Shanghai, but I accept that. For me, Starbucks is a safe haven in any foreign land where I can always speak the language and today the language was, “Decaf tall gingerbread latte with oat milk” in a red holiday cup, and it brought me intense joy after wandering in the cold  -9 degrees with a windchill that made it feel -15 degrees.

I spent the next few days hiking in forest in a national park and then visiting a sauna with a tall blond Finnish woman named Sanna. Sanna at the Sauna. The sauna was on the edge of the snowy shoreline of the Baltic Sea with a ladder disappearing straight into the icy waters. Sanna said that Finns believe it’s healthy to heat up in the sauna, dip into the freezing sea, and repeat 3x or more to feel euphoria.

Then she said, “But I don’t do that!!!” I knew immediately though, that I would do that, just as surely as Preet knew she’d try to cross Antarctica. It was 7pm at night when Sanna and I met and the sea was a black icy abyss – just a vast dark nothing – next to the snowy beach.

“It is normal to jump into the black water of the sea shrouded in total darkness, where the sea is frozen at the edges, because…” I say to myself, as I clutch the frozen ladder covered in icicles and lower myself into the black water. “Because somewhere there is a woman or man doing something more extreme.” Like climbing Everest. Or swimming the English Channel. There is someone running an ultramarathon in the Sahara Desert for fun. There is a lunatic out there doing a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle because they want to and not because someone is holding a gun to their head. That’s insane. This is merely lively.

I found I could easily get into the water the first time, for novelty’s sake, and Sanna joined me, getting in as far as her calves. But the second time, I started to feel fear, maybe because my fingertips and toes went completely numb. Now I knew just how cold that water was and I had to do it again.

As I exited the sauna and approached the cold water, I felt my body hesitating. Then I saw a Finnish man in a swimsuit nearby, exiting a different sauna.

“Come with me! Get in with me!” I shouted at him, something I would never do in daily life, but while standing in a black one-piece, hysterical in the snow, it felt acceptable.

He scampered over in his red swim trunks and together, on two ladders side by side, we lowered ourselves into the freezing cold dark water, screaming in unison.

I descended all the way down and then let go of the ladder and kicked back so that I was fully in the sea. Total black water and darkness. Cold icy stabbing all over my body.

He looked at me, in the water but still clutching the ladder. “We normally only dip!” he said. I tried to count to ten, treading water in the darkness.

 “That is so brave!” he said, already out of the water. I swam back to the ladder, my limbs already numb from the cold. As I pulled myself up, he already running back into the sauna to warm up. He turned around.

 “Where are you from?” he shouted at me from afar.

 “I’m from Texas!!!” I shouted back, which is something I never ever shout about, but the extreme cold prevented me from saying things like, “But I’ve lived in London for ten years, and I’m a very reasonable person.” 

I did it one more time and survived, Sanna joining me and going as far as her waist this time. I actually think I found the hot saunas much harder to bear than the cold water. At one point, a man poured hot water on the stones and the resulting scalding steam felt so incredibly hot on my face, my ears, my neck that I felt like I was actually on fire. None of the Finns in the sauna balked at all.

I put my head between my knees, in the airplane brace position, and held my face in my hands to try to endure the scalding steam and heat. “Doesn’t it BURN??!” I cried out to Sanna. “Let it burn,” she said. I grabbed my water bottle, which was also now SO HOT, and ran out of the sauna instead, barefoot into the snow.

And so I spent the last week or so in Sweden and Finland, doing lots of things like this and eating a lot of herring and salmon on rye bread and lying in the snow under trees and wandering around and talking to lots of Swedes and Finns. (I’m going to be writing much more about all of this in my next book, so if you haven’t already subscribed to this newsletter, you can do so here so you don’t miss out on any book news.)

It has been a delight to travel alone, after not enjoying it previously – on other solo trips, I always felt aimless or like I should be having more fun. But after being stuck at home for so long during Covid, it suddenly it feels like this immense privilege and I have loved it. I have loved doing whatever I wanted to do, like buying the Mermaid Tea (the packaging was impeccable) and wandering in the snow across the city for an hour to try the most amazing rice porridge and pastries just because and ordering spruce ice cream twice, which is made from the tree and tastes like a Christmas candle in the best way possible.

That said, if I had to do it for another week by myself, I would have died of loneliness in the snow.

When I was away, we drew names for Secret Santa at the bookshop in London. I got the name of a new guy who works there who I barely know, a man named Neil who told me he spent last Sunday watching a six-hour silent film about Napoleon by himself at the BFI. Six hour. Silent film. Alone.

“I wanted it to go on even longer,” he said.

How am I supposed to work with this?

One day Rebecca came in to say hi on her off-day and grabbed some things, left and texted me the harshest thing someone from Gen Z can say to you.

“There were no vibes in the bookshop today,” she wrote.

Neil and I have zero chemistry. I find us struggling to find any common ground. If in England, men talk about football to bond, I wanted to enlist the universal code of what women talk about to find some sort of common ground in 2023.

 “Does…does your girlfriend like Taylor Swift?” (I knew without having to ask that Neil himself does not.)

 “No,” he said.

How was I supposed to work with this?

I texted Walter for ideas on what to get Neil for Secret Santa, but he was taking ages to reply. When he finally did, he wrote back, “Sorry I just had to see a guy who had a painful penis.”

When Walter isn’t working in the bookshop, he’s a part-time doctor at an STD clinic. During slow days at the bookshop he reads the Oxford Handbook of Genitourinary Medicine, HIV, and Sexual Health. For some reason, this book gets lost in the shop often – last month, Walter was looking for it for ages and we found it in the history section. I like the idea of a customer finding it on a table and putting it away for us.

Walter recently lost the book again and had to send a group text asking us all to keep an eye out on it, this traveling book of STDs, the most promiscuous book on our shelves.

I tried to get Neil a voucher from the Italian deli down the road that I’d heard him talk about, but they didn’t do vouchers, so in a panic, I ended up buying him a pound of beef shin tortellini and storing it in the bookshop fridge. A mistake, for sure, but it’s too late now.

Back in Finland, my hair was super staticky, perhaps from the central heating in my hotel room. My skin was also extra dry and even though I’d been drinking so much water, I felt so thirsty. I’m usually very bad at drinking water away from home, but as I looked out at all the Christmas lights in Helsinki, I guzzled a glass of water and thought to myself, “I can’t, I just can’t let ‘it’ happen to me for the third Christmas in a row.”

I once wrote a story where the main character gets a UTI (urinary tract infection, cystitis, a bladder infection, burns when you pee and makes your life completely miserable, etc). The character eventually becomes so unwell, that she has to go to A&E (the emergency room) and pumped full of antibiotics with an IV for several days.

The note I’ve received from two different women is, “Isn’t that a bit over the top? Going to the emergency room for just a UTI?”

Something you can’t say in the middle of an editorial meeting with several people in a London office in Soho is, “Well, hmm, no, it is not over the top to go A&E for a UTI because it has personally happened to me. Twice.”

Instead, you have to reach into thin air and wave your arm around and say something like, “I just feel like this is where the character’s journey would have taken her.”

And then you lock eyes with the woman who made the comment and you wonder what kind of gilded life and long urethra she must be blessed with.

The difference between the character’s experience and mine is that when I get my UTI’s, I get them on Christmas, when all the GPs are closed and the pharmacies are closed and there is no choice, absolutely none whatsoever other than leaving Christmas dinner and having the most awkward conversation of your life. It’s that or die and I know this because I swear to God if there was another one I’d have taken it.

Imagine looking your British mother-in-law in the eyes and saying, “I have a UTI, I need to go the emergency room and miss dessert. Please save me some apple pie.” And she will nod slightly, her eyes barely giving away the truth which is that she now knows you, you who have been staying in her house for the past week, eating the food she cooked and drinking the cups of tea she made, have also been apparently, f-king the beloved son she birthed. In her own home. That she welcomed you in. Eating the food she cooked you and drinking the cups of tea she made you while you were off etc etc etc.  

There is no shame greater. What’s so wonderful about all of this is that I did it twice, two Christmases in a row.

When I was explaining this to my friend Chantal, she was bewildered. She knew what having a UTI meant. WE ALL KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. OKAY. WE KNOW. We know. We know. We know.

To which all I could say was, “IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!”

Also, may I refer you to yearning and Paris and how I don’t drink water when I’m not home. Not drinking water + “it’s Christmas” spirit = fever, crying, dying, burning, emergency room.

The first time it happened, I could not get a doctor’s appointment, so I called 111 in the UK. I called and called and no one really seemed to care? Then I had a fever that kept returning. I kept taking ibuprofen at night and it would go away and I’d think “I will be better in the morning.” And then in the morning I would have a fever again.

I texted a group of female friends and they all had advice because this is such a common hell we must endure. Drink cranberry juice, drink bicarbonate soda mixed with water to make yourself alkaline, drink gallons of water, take a bath in bicarbonate soda. None of it worked.

I had started shivering uncontrollably and googled, “What happens if you don’t treat a UTI” and an article came up about a woman who had sepsis from one and died. That’s about the point when I start filling my backpack with snacks, books and water and decided that I shall be spending the evening in A&E.

When you go to the emergency room at Christmas, you know that everyone in the waiting room is extremely ill because this horrible, germy, miserable room is not where you want to be on Christmas.  

My infection was so advanced that I had a high fever, kidney pain and felt dizzy. I’m allergic to penicillin and the doctor on duty told me I needed intravenous antibiotics and that I had to come back 5 days in a row to get them administered.

My doctor was called Louis and he wore a mask and despite this, I was convinced that he was very handsome. I was also wearing a mask, sweating from the fever and delirious. He had to go through a questionnaire and when he asked, “Any recreational drugs?” I answered, “No, I barely drink, I’m the purest person ever,” because I need all doctors to think I am virtuous and wholesome and that none of this could be my fault.

It was 2am when I got my first round of IV antibiotics but my heart rate was so high that they wouldn’t let me leave until it came down, so I just sat there for hours chugging water and praying that my heart rate would slow down enough to be allowed to go home. When it finally did, the two nurses on duty clapped for me and I shuffled out the door, ready to return the next day for another round of antibiotics.  I walked out into the cold air and there was a brass band outside the hospital playing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

I remember walking by them thinking, I will not die of this UTI. I refuse. I simply refuse to let this be how I die. I will not permit the following situation to happen:

Person 1: “Remember Jessica Pan?”

Person 2: “ Yeah?” (or “Hot husband?”)”

Person 1: “She DIED!”

Person 2: “What? She was so beautiful and humble and full of life HOW HOW HOW WHAT COULD HAVE POSSIBLY TAKEN HER FROM US?”

Person 1: “ A UTI.”

Person 2: “That’s a bit over the top, don’t you think?”

The second time I got a UTI on Christmas, I sought help before things got that bad. However every pharmacy and GP was closed and so, once again, I delivered the grave news to my mother-in-law, her eyebrows saying, “What? Again? Really? Two Christmases in a row? In my house where you sleep on the sheets I washed and eat the roast dinner I cooked, and open the presents I bought you, you dare to … etc etc etc” and then I headed to the emergency room, as is now tradition. ** 

My husband came with me this time (as he should as it’s mostly his fault, anyway, isn’t it?), and we sat together, watching a man in his thirties with grey skin cough all over us. We were both convinced he was more dead than alive.

After my name was called, the doctor said, “Yep, you definitely have a UTI.” She handed me a prescription and then a worried expression came over her face.

“What?” I said.

“There’s only one pharmacy open right now and they close in 15 minutes.”

“There’s no pharmacy here in the hospital?” I asked, aghast.

“No,” she said.

I grabbed the prescription from her and ran, grabbing my husband Sam from the waiting room and shouting, “WE ONLY HAVE FIFTEEN MINUTES!!!

He drove as fast as he could, but when we pulled up the building, it was dark and the door was locked.

I started crying, then wailing. The next day was Dec 26^th – Boxing Day –  and most pharmacies would be closed then, too. I would be in agony for another night. And then…

I saw him. The grey-skinned half-dead man walking. He was coming out of a parking lot next door, carrying a little paper bag.

 “OMIGOD!” I shouted. I jumped out the car and ran to him.

 “WHERE IS THE PHARMACY? IS IT OPEN?” The half-dead man pointed to a building hidden behind the dark one we were parked in front of. I saw Christmas lights inside and my heart soared. I ran towards it, opened the jangly door, slammed my prescription down on counter shouting, “DO YOU HAVE NITROFURANTOIN?”

And the man behind the counter said they did.

Minutes later, I jumped back into the car, swallowed my first pill and kissed Sam. And that’s how the Hallmark Christmas movie of my life would end.

Happy holidays, everyone. I’ll see you here next year.

And remember: be merry, but also, drink lots of water. I hope you don’t get a UTI, because those things can kill you.

** My mother-in-law is actually very kind and understanding, but she has also never had a UTI.

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously). It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary.

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things.  It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson 

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’  Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

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