Last week, in honor of Thanksgiving, my body staged a major shut down. I had not been sick at all despite months of taunting my immune system. I'd hauled a suitcase around the country, trained for and participated in a big race, and gone running in climates from wintry Fairbanks to Anchorage in the springtime (that's the season right now, right?). I was doing great, until I started to shiver, my voice stopped working, and my lungs tried to turn themselves inside out. The doctor ultimately called it pneumonia.
Reflecting on this experience, and I have had plenty of down time now, it occurs to me that having my body throw my world to a screeching halt may hold an important lesson.
Before I got sick, I was invincible. Like a bratty teenager, I felt I had somehow, mysteriously, mastered the art of infallibility, and if only others around me could do the same, we'd all be much happier.
I imagined an anti-sickness force field that I fed with regular outdoor activity. Who needs health insurance? (Answer: I need health insurance, and I have it, and I have never been so grateful). Who needs "rest"? Even though I was a terribly unhealthy, asthmatic, chronically hospitalized kid, as an adult I have worked hard to become outdoorsy and physically fit and therefore provide for myself the fountain of youth. Mine was the trickle down economics of preventative health care. As long as I was taking care of myself in the broader sense of things, the smaller threats to my health and well being would surely fall into place.
Just wimpy?
So when I first felt tired, I wondered if I wasn't being kind of wimpy. I told my coworkers I was going home early but felt guilty. I walked home, shivering the whole way but also imagining that the fresh air was good for me. I canceled dinner plans. I felt bad; not just physically but also in a more global "am I just feeling lazy?" way. I watched a bad movie and drank tea and didn't feel much better about anything.
By the time the bug had settled neatly in my chest, squeezing tight and making it difficult for me to breathe, I still wasn't convinced I was really, truly sick. I told myself I'd push through it. I kept trying.
My body pushed back. The shivering worsened and I remembered what a fever feels like. Instead of going running outside in my favorite state park near my parents' house in the Lower 48, I lay on a couch shivering and sweating under three blankets. I went to the doctor, who said it was a viral infection and there was nothing to be done. Come back if it got worse.
I've said half-jokingly that I like to get good and sick once a year so I can make sure I have all of "Arrested Development" committed to memory, and I can really bond with my tea kettle and couch. That's a nice thought. That's the movie version of sick, maybe a slightly more severe version of what Ferris Bueller had. What I really mean is that I like a reason to take an occasional time out. Smokers get cigarette breaks, right? Sometimes I just want to hit pause on everything, but getting really sick is different.
Difficult to breath
By the time I went back to the doctor, I'd become much worse. It was almost comical that I threw my back out in the waiting room while coughing, but it actually felt scary because at that point coughing was the only way I was able to clear enough space in my chest to breathe.
I'd time my coughing fit for approximately every hour by agitating my lungs with a couple sprays from my rescue inhaler. A snake of air would scratch through my lungs and cause me to cough, making temporary room for new air. A month earlier, I participated in an iron distance triathlon. I thought about the race a lot as I focused on coughing enough to clear my airways. The effort and determination it took were similar — another way triathlon training helped me in my daily life. To me, that parallel was kind of funny, but I didn't have the wind in my lungs to laugh. And that was scary.
Asthmatics will recognize this feeling. A teacher once did an exercise with our class where non-asthmatic students had to breathe through coffee straws to try and replicate the feeling of an asthma attack. That feeling of pinched-off breath is correct, but it happens farther down in your chest, at the root of where breath comes from.
Finally, I got relief. I sat on white paper in a small bright room. I had a plastic mouthpiece clenched between my teeth and I breathed in the vapor produced through a small chamber of medication. It tasted like saline. Slowly, air started moving through my lungs around what felt and sounded like boulders grinding around in my chest. The doctor announced that the viral infection had taken root and graduated to pneumonia, which made it treatable (congratulations to me!). She prescribed me an antibiotic and a 5-day course of prednisone. I went home and sat back down on the couch for the rest of the week.
I had not been this sick since I was 12 years old.
Although I am much better than I was, I'm still recovering and I'm wondering what that means. My lungs aren't normal yet. My voice isn't back. I'm not used to this reduced ability to participate in the world, and it's something I don't know how to moderate. I like saying "yes" to things. I want to go running. Now.
But I can't just go running — or rather, I shouldn't, and as someone responsible for my body I have to make those kinds of decisions. That sounds boring. That's less fun than firing on all fronts; doing all the races, hiking all the hills, going all the places. However, the amazingly simple lesson I learned these past few weeks is that the least fun thing of all is pneumonia. I suppose this is the hallmark of adulthood; what they mean when they say "take care of yourself." Grudgingly, I'm going to figure out how to do that. I may even rest.
Alli Harvey lives, works and plays in Anchorage.