As the title says, instead of enjoying my first double weekend of the CX season thrashing myself all over the Westwood course, I instead found myself in Morristown Memorial Hospital with some bug thrashing myself internally. After last weekend's race at Ringwood I knew I was tired but as Tuesday went on I was really exhausted and then started to come down with something on Wednesday. Enough so that I scheduled a Dr's appt Thursday morning and then Thursday afternoon I wound up in the hospital.
I had the worst headache I have EVER had. It wasn't excruciating so much that I just couldn't function with it. I just wanted to sleep. That's all I did. I slept from being admitted Thursday afternoon until Sunday morning. When I went in, besides the headache, I had a 103 degree fever, chills, body aches, sensitivity to light and sound. It was horrible. So they did a battery of tests and thought it was either a bad respiratory infection, or bacterial/viral meningitis. They quickly ruled out the bacterial meningitis as that's the bad stuff that you can die from - thank goodness. Next they were still confused at to the other two. The main way to find out is to do a lumbar puncture(spinal tap) and see if there is any sign of the meningitis in the spinal fluid. From somebody that is very active, the last thing I want is someone poking around by my spine. Plus the blood thinners make it extra tricky because of the possible complications that could become.
So with the Dr's all talking - evidently just to themselves, because it seems like no one at the hospital communicated with each other - they agreed to try and reverse my blood thinners and do the spinal tap in a day or two. Fine. In that day or two I was on antibiotics and antivirals and I made a huge turnaround which prompted them to think that it wasn't the viral meningitis as that usually takes waaaaay longer. So no spinal tap was needed - officially. Whew....
So here I sit on my first day back out of the hospital and I'm living life on my own terms again. I feel so much better just to be deciding what I do and what I get to eat. I got out on the bike and all is right again. I don't know why it's so good for me or what the feeling actually is to put it into words but I can't. It's something I just need to feel like myself. I did nothing special, I went nowhere special, I did nothing inspiring, yet I felt like a million bucks just riding my bike.
Hopefully 2011 will be a more healthy year but there's still much more to do in 2010. I'll be racing cross again soon. 3 weeks to turn things back around and get on it. More fun yet to come...
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