The Triathlon Rx

Friday confessionals returning with a vengeance!! If you’ve never played before, do a quick check of the 101. Anything is fair game, and it really is more fun to play along!

1. Sick chick.

And I don’t mean sick in the way cool / sick / tight / wicked / sweet / dope / fresh / anything that doesn’t actually mean “awesome”  but yet is somehow used interchangeably. Between last Wednesday (on my birthday. Not sweet, nor dope.) and this Monday, my temperature was bobbing between 102.5 and 100.7. What started out as a Dx of strep throat turned to a prescription for amoxicillin that wasn’t making me feel any better (or cooler). Turns out that I had pneumonia, which may or may not have been due to the strep that was or was not even there to begin with. So I’ve spent a lot of time here:

Influenza test -> Strep test -> cute note from “Kathryn” en español!

By the fireplace, under the covers, in the dark. (Creeper.)

Thankfully, since going back to the clinic on Monday and confirming pneumonia with the chest x-rays, they switched me to levoflaxacin and I’m feeling 97% better. My grandma has had pneumonia so many times and I never had any idea how miserable she felt!! It was I imagine a collapsed lung feels like. (My surgeon would not have been impressed with that come Wednesday….)

2. Five days until they cut my leg off.

Yes, the countdown is going strong. With all this sick business over the last week, I can tell you I was pissed bummed about missing gym time. And I have no problem fully admitting to hitting the gym the second my doctor said “I guess if you’re feeling bett…..” I have been asked multiple times by several friends:

You just can’t give it a rest, can you?!

Not today my friend. And I will tell you what… when you have two months of ass-to-couch time staring you down, you can make whatever decision you want concerning your last five days. But as long as I have been given the green light to exercise, and am not by any chance contagious, I will sweat it out until the very last possible minute.

3. I am actually scared to death for surgery.

Sure, it’s easy to look brave behind words… to say well, you can’t always chose the cards you’re dealt and there’s no way around it, so let’s do this thing! Slowly over this last week, the reality of the lifestyle changes I’m about to face has really started to set in. We have such a small amount of snow right now here in Minneapolis, and I know it’s only a matter of time before mother nature decides to unload 2 feet on us. Thinking about crutching out to my car and trying to scrape it off… thinking about crutching downstairs to/from my apartment… thinking about how the DUCK do I carry a coffee cup!?!?! All hitting the fan.

This is a rough estimate of the procedure they are doing… which I wrote more about in this post.

The wedge that you can see gets removed, leaving a brand new, fresh surface that needs to heal together. Along with the bone healing around the screws. And plate running along the lateral side of the femur. Not to mention there is a big unpredictable tumor chunk that has, until this point, proven to do whatever the heck it wants…

It never asked me if I liked the question “Why do you walk with a limp?” (No.) It never asked me if I wanted to run just one last marathon. (I started my list when I was 10.) It never asked me how I felt about crutches when it’s -20°, icy, and snowing. (Can I take coffee with me? No? Ok, angry.) It never asked me if ever wanted to sleep on my left side again. (How about just through the night?) It never asked me how I felt being left out of any/all plyometrics. (Like I’m defective.) It never asked me how it feels to explain what fibrous dysplasia is 100billion times and have every single person you just explained it to look at you and still not get it. (#GTFOH)

4. I feel super selfish.

Reread last paragraph. I can think of an equal 100billion ways it could probably be worse.

5. The Hand Crank…

- Is really kind of harder than you’d think.
- Burns like 1/3rd of the calories you can burn while running, and still feels kind of harder than you’d think.
- Is quite possibly more boring than pool running…
- Unless you find a good song that you can get krunk to crank to… in which case it might not be so bad.
- I’m going to need a lot of new songs on my iPod.
- Is kind of lonely, since there are only two in the gym (attitude correction: there are two in the gym!) and I don’t see anyone else on them.
- Which may be a blessing in disguise because I’ll never have to wait for it.
- Unless it snows two feet, in which case my butt ain’t gettin to the gym in the first place.
- Mmmm yep, still waiting for that attitude / perspective / expectations adjustment.

And that my chicostix… is about five things more than I’ve ‘fessed up to until today. And it does feel BETTER. Especially number 4. It’s good to get things off your chest….

#feelsgoodman

(1000 bonus points for the right reference.)

Reader Qs: Your turn!

-E