In awe

Day 142

I am on medication and my body is still very weak. Most symptoms are starting to go away. I knees are weak. Sometimes it is hard to go up the stairs. The inflammation of my back is gone now. I am no longer sore anywhere on my body. My sore throat has gone away. My jaw hinge is no longer hurting. All kind of weird stuff that was happening before are gone. One of my ear is still block from time to time. My balance is off.

One thing though I am still very weak. I get out of breath easily and my heart too races too frequently. It is getting better.

I tried to do some hiking today even though my friend protested against it. It was supposed to be a 9 mile loop at the Little Devil Stair. It is not an easy hike but not a too hard a hike either (rated one of the most difficult in our area) but runners run on this trail. I did it couple times before. To me it was easy. You climb it like stairs. Imagine it is a 100 stories building, like the empire state building.

The trail started off gently for a mile and then shoot straight up for a thousand foot climb. Something like that. I did the first mile fine. I was strong. Then came the climb. I think I got to 3/4 of the way up when I became very weak all the sudden. I was out of breath and breathing hard. My heart was racing. We took a stop for me to rest up. I got my breathing under control and calmed my heart. Then we continue on. We didn’t get more than 20 steps, my vision started to go blury. My hearing too. I was disassociating all things around me. It was like I am floating. I could hardly focus. I couldn’t hear what my friend was saying. Everything was muffled. Something about I should sit down.

I sat down. Luckily that stopped me from fainting. I felt I was on the verge of tumbling over. I told myself I got to hold on else it will freak my friend out. She was very worried about me already.

She asked if I wanted to turn around. That choice never occur to me. I knew we were almost to the top yet, the last quarter mile seemed impossible for me to go on. I felt if I took another 20 steps the same thing might happened again.

I told the group I can manage to get down the mountain by myself, but they were worried. So the whole group walked with me back down the ravine. I was grateful but embarrassed.

I made it down and back to the car. I never imagined I can be this weak. I felt I can do it. Yet, when my body run out of energy it just shuts down and it was very scary. When I am not moving I felt I have enormous amount of energy and I can take on anything. However, once I started to move, my energy quickly used up.

I then waited at the car as some of them tackled the trail again. They did the shorter version (5 miles) and ran down the last 3 miles. I wasn’t sad. Just a bit disappointed at my body is unable to keep up.