Last Friday I had to call off work unexpectedly because I was sick.  And when I say I was sick, it wasn’t like the usual can’t-be-bothered-to-get-up kind of sick.  This was the puking sick.

But also, it wasn’t that kind of sick.  First off, I don’t get sick.  Well, there was that one time I tried doing CrossFit and puked, but that was a totally different experience and reason.  Even when I had the flu, which is a really rare occurrence in itself (because I don’t get sick), I didn’t throw up.  Second, there was no reason for me to get sick like that.  I hadn’t eaten anything out of the ordinary, in fact, I didn’t even really eat anything for dinner at all.  I had no warning signs, it just came up on me quickly.  I woke up with massive stomach pains.

Obviously, I’m not telling the whole story, because there is a probable reason why I got sick, but I didn’t put the two together until later that day and had to get some confirmation from a friend and later, online.

Normally, when I go to bed, I leave a small kitchen light on.  It’s a single bulb light and I’ve discussed the special wiring in the Casa blog when I was changing it to LED.  Normally, as I say, that light is on.  But you can read in many places that in order to get the best quality sleep, you should sleep in complete darkness.  Since my sleeping has been variable for quite some time, I decided Thursday night to leave that kitchen light off, which does leave my house dark.

Despite the small change to my sleeping ritual that night, everything else was kept the same.  My additional sleeping aids of the sound machine and 1mg of melatonin were applied and effective.  And, right on schedule, I woke up at around 3am to go to the bathroom.  Nothing out of the ordinary.

But was out of the ordinary was the extra darkness.  I’m not sure if it’s like this for everyone, but when it’s really dark, and sometimes with my eyes closed, I feel like I can still "see" the room.  It’s like an infrared vision or like an x-ray.  Maybe it’s just a memory, because I have never considered trying this special sight in an unfamiliar room.  But anyway, I made my way to the bathroom using my night vision, still half asleep.

And my vision failed me terribly.  I misjudged how far into the room I was and turned straight into a door frame, cracking my forehead on the corner of the molding.  After a brief pause and some self-deprecating comments, I continued in the correct direction and rested my skull in my hands while on the toilet.  The return trip to the bed was less eventful and I fell asleep again quickly.

About two hours later I woke up with the major stomach pains and wandered back to the bathroom, where I chewed up some Tums to settle my stomach.  I had made it to the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water when I got the unmistakable, undeniable, certain feeling that there was going to be some puking soon.  And I was correct.  However, there was nothing in my stomach.  Well, some Tums, but nothing else.

I went back to bed and reasoned that if I was sick enough to puke, and I don’t puke, I should call off work.  Oddly, my manager didn’t answer the phone, and his manager didn’t either, so I had to go to the third in command to submit my request.  And afterwards, I fell asleep for another 5 hours.

The rest of the day I sort of wandered around in a daze.  Food helped and didn’t make me any sicker.  I didn’t really feel weak.  I had no more nausea.  But later that afternoon, I had a memory somewhere about concussions causing nausea and vomiting.  Well, that makes my head injury seem a lot more important now.  After confirming with my friendly paramedic, and later reading about concussions online, yeah, that’s probably what it was.  If I was being extra attentive and sensitive, I could note that I had brief flashes of headaches come and go.

As it turns out, I guess I did take the best course of action and rested for the weekend.  Everything was pretty normal by Saturday, and I got some extra napping in, too.  Am I going to be any dumber for the incident?  I don’t know how I would know.  Wait, is that a sign?

Here’s a story from my past.  It’s the time I left my home town for a job in a new city.  I had secured an apartment and moved all my belongings there, now I was there for good and unpacking and assembling things.  I had the weekend to get as much accomplished as possible before starting my new job.

I had my cat, Mess, to keep me company.  He was a pretty chill cat and the change of environment didn’t really faze him.  He settled in quickly while I kept doing my work.  But something was really weird about the whole process.  I couldn’t tell if I was just tired from the move or just overwhelmed with it, but I was constantly wiped out.  I could work for a hour or so, but then I would have to rest.  That’s not the way I was in my 20’s.

Regardless, I pressed on, taking short breaks to rest up while I kept unpacking.  In one of the boxes, I found my CO detector.  Living up north with gas heaters, it was a fairly normal practice to have one or more of these, especially where I grew up – so many old houses.  Without thinking much about it, I plugged the detector in and kept right on going.

You can probably tell where this story is going already.  And sure enough, in probably about five minutes, the alarm started blaring.  I’d never had the detector go off before, so I was confused.  Before I yanked it out of the wall, I saw the digital display said 150, which is the parts-per-million of CO detected.  I thought the detector went bad somehow from the move (decreased mental function, right?) so I plugged it back in.  As a normally-functioning person would expect, the alarm went off again.  So I grabbed an extension cord and ran the detector outside.  The display read zero.  Well, now.

I called the apartment office and explained the situation.  They told me that was normal because I was in a corner apartment next to the parking lot and car exhaust fumes would collect there.  I pushed back and said I didn’t think these numbers were normal.  Even if that was normal, WTF?  With resignation, they said they could have the gas company come out the next day and test it.  That’s about as good as I was going to get, so I went to bed in my oxygen-deprived apartment.

The next day, the office manager came over and we waited for the gas company.  When the worker showed up and knocked on the door, he had his testing device in his hand and he was pissed – legitimately angry.  “Do you see these levels I’m getting on my reader?”  I didn’t, but I took his word for it.  He came into the apartment and tested the different rooms and declared the apartment unsafe.  The apartment manager was highly embarrassed and immediately set me up with a furnished apartment until they could resolve the issue.

It turned out that the hot water tank in the apartment above me had a leaky flue, which was sending CO into my apartment.  So, problem solved and life went on.  But I always felt terrible for Mess.  I was able to leave the apartment for meals and whatnot, but he was in that CO environment 24 hours a day.  Cats sleep most all day anyway, so how could I tell the difference?  I guess he was probably lucky to even survive that incident, but he probably lost a lot of brain cells.

I live in an all-electric environment now and have always retained a slight distrust of gas-powered devices, despite the benefits they might offer like being cheaper or more efficient.  I also have a slight paranoia about CO.  This story came to mind because I recently just got my garage back at my house, so I can park my car in it, but I’m finding I’m (probably excessively and irrationally) spooked about the exhaust fumes from the car.  Maybe it’s time to buy another CO detector.

Um, hi again.

It’s been a little bit since I’ve posted anything here.  Things kind of went weird for me a while ago.  I’m not really into exposing a lot of myself online, but I’ll summarize my radio silence as collateral damage from the combination of worry of my health, sadness of current events, and fear about work performance.  It’s been an eye-opening experience in the sense that I understand some things now that I could not understand before.

I have a small backlog of drafts that I wrote during the time I did not feel like “talking” to anyone, so I can have a little content to wrap up 2018.  I can say that 2019 is going to be a very interesting year.  Maybe it’s premature for me to make any claims of success on a few good days in a row, but optimism has to be better than where I’m coming from.

Oh yeah?  How was that experience?

Let’s start with the night before any of this.  Actually, we can go back a little further, because I already said I pulled my fitness tracker out of retirement and as such, made at least a small commitment to addressing my declining health.  I’d been walking pretty regularly, maybe 2.5 miles a day, weekdays.  Then, I decided to address the issue with my bike and get road tires so that I could use the bike on a stationary stand and get some higher cardio benefits.  And then I agreed to at least try exercising with the GF on the weekends I was over there.  So, in my mind, I was committing to one day a week of a real workout.

The night before the first workout, I was hit with anxiety.  I don’t get anxiety, but that’s just another “don’t” that was destined to fall this weekend.  I woke up in the middle of the night and my heart was pounding.  Like pounding so hard it was making my breathing stutter.  I did eventually fall asleep again, but had a poor sleep and woke up the next morning little unchanged.

Normally, I don’t worry about things.  I have a “just do it” mindset and just go, ignoring whatever consequences there might be.  This time was different.  This felt like going to the dentist, where I just disassociate and become a zombie. (Although my current dentist is pretty amazing and although I’m over the fear of most procedures, some are still unknown.)  So, we get to the gym (a “box” in their terms) and I’m just sitting against the wall staying away from everyone.  I had no idea what to say, do, or behave.  I wasn’t sure if I would be guided or just left to figure it out on my own.

We start out with a warmup – running.  The only time I can ever remember running was doing track events in summer school, like 30 years ago.  But running is instinctual, so I just did it.  I got winded pretty quickly.  My mouth dried out and that was it for me.  But that wasn’t it for the workout.  That was the “warmup”.  There was also stretching and some other stuff I don’t even remember anymore.  Oh yeah, ring rows in place of pull ups.  Couldn’t do ‘em.  I think I was on my third set when my body gave out.  I was near passing out and every time I mentally set myself to expend the effort to do a set of rows, nausea welled up in me.

So that first day, I figure I was only able to do half a workout.  Pathetic.  I was assured that the first day is always the hardest.  And after resting and getting all calmed down, I wasn’t yet done for the day.  I don’t get anxiety.  I don’t run.  I also don’t puke.

But today is full of firsts.  It’s a pretty raw memory for me, back in 1995 or so, when I last hurled, barfed, upchucked, chunderspewed, vomited, or puked.  And that night I swore I would never do it again.  I would do anything to keep that from happening again.  But today, after thinking I had dodged the possibility once again, when everything was calm, the warning hit me.  It’s strange how you instinctively know how to run and also strange that you know when you are going to throw up.  Your body actually preps you for it by coating your throat with mucus to protect it from the coming tsunami of acid.  And that taste and sensation is unforgettable, even after decades.

I made my announcement and swiftly, yet calmly, went to the bathroom, whereupon I did the deed.  My unbroken streak was now broken.  All in the name of some sort of health benefit.  Cruelly, the gym makes you sign and date a puking man mural on the wall when you fail to keep your fluids.  But I was assured (again.  Lots of assurance here) many times that people only sign the wall once.

So, that was fun.  Sounds fun, right?  Let’s do it again tomorrow!  Fuck yeah!  More running, more stretching, more things.  Jumprope, throwing medicine balls, pushups, weights.  Again, I failed about midway through, but that was also because I knew when that nausea feeling arrived, it was not something to fuck with.

So, that was fun, too, right?  Except for the fact that my muscles really fucking hurt.  So, tomorrow, then?  It’ll just be a private workout at a friend’s house.  What’s to say about that?  More of the same, more failing halfway through.  Much more pain in the muscles, especially the legs.

It’s hard to say where this is going to go, but it’s not fun.  I’m assured that it’s going to get better.  The first day is the hardest.  The second day is better.  In a week or two it will start feeling good.  I am not sure if people that work out have a different definition of what “feel good” means.  This is probably the most radical change I’ve made in my life, just in the span of three days.  I can’t evaluate it yet.