The past couple of weeks, I’ve been rather ill. I thought it was the flu, and that’s what the doctors gave me medicine for. They gave me an antiviral product called Tamiflu. This thing cost me $100 with insurance, you all! And so many people have gotten the flu these days that many pharmacies didn’t even have it in stock! However, it may have all been for nothing because the duration of this bout seems much longer than the flu calls for. Also, the symptoms have been slightly inconsistent. It is quite possible that it could have been bronchitis or some variant of pneumonia. All I know is that I’ve been feeling terrible for weeks.
The sequence of what happened was really strange. First, I had what I believe was the flu. This came with coughing, cold sweats, aching muscles, a stuffy nose, headaches, a loss of appetite, and more. I didn’t take any special medicine, just the usual over-the-counter flu stuff, and I took some days to rest. Seemingly, I got better, but little did I know what was to come.
Shortly thereafter, my throat began to hurt a lot. It was really, really painful, so I went to a walk-in clinic. They prescribed antibiotics for me to start taking for 10 days. This helped with the throat and related earache, but it affected my stomach badly! I had some serious digestion problems due to the antibiotics affecting my stomach bacteria, even though I was taking probiotics to offset the damage. My stomach was really torn up!
Just as I began to finish this round of medicine, my body started to feel off again. Then I began to have the cold shivers again. There was no coughing, sneezing, or cold-like symptoms, just heavy sweating while freezing and shivering uncontrollably. Then came the body and head aches, yet still no coughing or cold-like symptoms. My doctor prescribed the aforementioned Tamiflu, and I took that for 5 days.
It’s been about 9 days since the onset of the third round of illness, and I’m finally starting to physically feel better. I no longer have to load myself up with pain killers and lay in bed shivering while sweating up a storm. I still sound nasally and I’m coughing more now than during the peak of this flu or whatever it was. But I’m starting to breathe normally and I’m hopefully on the mend.
There were some days that my body and head hurt so much that I didn’t want to even be conscious. Thank goodness for Advil and the fact that my body responds to that when it comes to unbearable pain. The point I wanted to touch on was that there were days I was in so much physical pain that I began to have irrational thoughts. I lost my appetite, which is extremely rare for me! I’m always hungry, but there were days I didn’t eat anything at all.
At one point, I began to wonder about what happens after we die. Will there be nothingness? Will I simply cease to exist? Or will I have to account for how I lived my life? I never think that way, but the pain was really influencing how I thought. I found that fascinating, even at the time. I’m not a particularly religious person, yet there I was pondering those deep questions as I lay in bed dealing with the pain and the sweats.
This got me thinking about how people who live with chronic pain must feel day after day. I thought about how persistent, unrelenting pain can push a person into a very dark place mentally. That’s something that’s difficult to fully understand unless you’ve experienced it firsthand, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that one could fall deeper and deeper into despair because of ongoing pain. I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.
I’m grateful that I’m recovering, and I hope to return to my regular life and training very soon! One thing is for sure, going forward I will take at a minimum one day, and maybe two days, to rest from training during the week. I don’t know what caused me to get this sick, but it is quite possible that overtraining left me vulnerable. I’ll be removing that as a variable and see how things go.
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