I started coughing as soon as I landed in Colombo.

My cough was nothing, a small annoyance that sounded petty, as though I disapproved of the person I was talking to but didn’t want to come out and say so. It was peevish and prim. “Cer cer. Cer cer.” When I coughed, people looked almost imperceptibly annoyed, as though I was correcting them on a pronunciation or something. My cough embarrassed me. I tried to suppress it.

I pushed on in that first week of travel, the cough becoming bigger. When the elephant gathering I was scheduled to see was cancelled (the parks were closed because half a dozen rangers had been beaten up by a mob of angry villagers), I went to bed at 2pm and slept through dinner, waking feverish and disoriented at midnight, monkeys playing on the roof. The cough seeming to drop further down my chest. Like me, it was travelling.

The next day we pushed on, up to the far north, so long closed to foreigners after years of civil war. Hours and hours we drove, up the guts of Sri Lanka to the north coast city of Jaffna. I lay in the back of the van, as the landscape became increasingly stark, my throat stripped like bark, stopping for roadside coconuts cut open with machetes. I told myself it was only a cough and not to worry.

Jaffna: salt pans, straggly palms, a landscape that was green and grey and a sun that wasn’t so much dappled as something harsher, that bleached everything out into a wash of white light. The salt in the air was almost suspended by the thickness of the heat. It felt as though you were walking through endless veils.

The hotel was next to a construction site where, on the roof, they had set up large floodlights and men worked through the night hammering, but it didn’t matter because I was coughing so much now that it was hard to sleep. In the eerie laptop glow, I googled the meaning of different coloured phlegm.

Early the next day I shuffled from pharmacy to pharmacy because I heard you could get sleeping pills in Sri Lanka without a prescription. This turned out not to be true. I returned to the hotel with a blister pack of paracetamol and a small bottle of cough syrup.

That morning I crammed on to a fishing boat out to Delft Island, pressed in thigh to thigh, back to back with other tourists and religious pilgrims under the brutal sun, and then on the island travelled in an old Red Cross ambulance used now as a taxi, that took us down potholed roads lined with dry walls made from coral chunks to a colonial fort and a Hindu temple and a very old tree. In the back of the ambulance we were thrown from our seats on the rough road and our shoes and clothes were covered in dust. I sucked on a lozenge and longed for the hotel room, and the bedsheets tight with their hospital corners.

Back in Jaffna, as I coughed outside the library that had been burned down in the civil war, my driver suggested I go to a doctor. I resisted, because it was just a cough. But I was becoming afraid of the cough and kept hoping it would pass.

I texted my group chat: “This cough isn’t getting any better. Should I go to a doctor?” The reply was immediate: Don’t muck around with respiratory stuff when you travel. Get seen!

I went to the hospital and, on the way, I felt stupid tears well in my eyes, not because I was in pain, but because I was far from home, and even though I was sure I would be all right, I also imagined too easily now that I was not OK and that I would die somewhere in Sri Lanka from an untreated infection. From just a small cough. It happened all the time, right?

The hospital looked like a business park in outer suburbia, with its 1980s amber glass-fronted office suites. But it was comforting in its order and familiar tropes: nurses in starched white uniforms, small rooms where the doctors sat, and a dispensary that accepted all major credit cards.

My doctor told me I had a lung infection and gave me a prescription for seven different medicines including two antibiotics. Back in the hotel I slept dreamlessly for 14 hours.

We left Jaffna and headed into the hill country. I was writing about a wellness retreat that had just been named one of Time magazine’s top 100 destinations in the world.

Once there, I could barely climb stairs and was tired all the time. But it was a good place to be unwell; it was beautiful and quiet and had, in the soft tread of the staff and clarifying mountain air, the echoes of a sanatorium.

When I wasn’t coughing, I could hear strange sounds coming from my chest. It was weird – and very disconcerting – to hear my previously quiet insides. The noise coming from my chest sounded like rice bubbles in milk: a snap, crackle and pop. Also a hiss, like the air going out of a tyre. When I googled this, I read this sound was made by “patients with pneumonia, atelectasis, pulmonary fibrosis, acute bronchitis, bronchiectasis, interstitial lung disease or post thoracotomy or metastasis ablation”.

I took pills, slept and drank the juices and ayurvedic medicines provided by the retreat, settled into the slowed-down funk of the unwell. Days were slow and dream-like and nights were spent reading Fire and Fury under the mosquito net on the four-poster bed – the tight net around me carrying old allusions of quarantine and convalescence.

In the spa, they rubbed Vicks on my chest, listened to my breathing with a stethoscope and told me the infection was chronic but to rest, take the medicine, and it would pass.

For three days and nights I lay in a brilliant glass cube bedroom, suspended in the hills above a valley and watched thin smoke trails and a handful of lights turn on at dusk, and the only sounds (apart from my lungs) were the Buddhist chants from some nearby hill temple. At night the sky was vast, dark and complex with stars.

When you are well you can’t imagine getting sick, and when you are sick it’s hard to imagine being well. Susan Sontag said: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

To enter this kingdom in a kingdom not your own is to enter a sort of double vulnerability. But to be cared for in that other kingdom, and to get well again in that other kingdom, feels right now, still here – still coughing but less so now, like some sort of benediction.

• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist