This semester has thus far not gone according to plan. We’re on the cusp of what is technically the fourth week of classes, and I’ve been in the classroom precisely twice: once on Wednesday, September 2, for the first day introduction and syllabus discussion, and once on Monday, September 7, for an actual teaching day. I had a meeting in New York starting on Thursday of that week, and so had already cancelled classes for Wednesday the 9th, building that absence into my class schedules.

What I hadn’t counted on was developing a cough about 30 seconds after I finished teaching on the 2nd, as noted in my last post. This cough started as what I assumed was irritation from all the smoke in the air from the Station Fire to our west, and then turned into the dry tickle-in-your-throat cough produced by post-nasal drip. Which is what it still was on the 9th, as I headed for New York.

By the time I got to New York, though, the cough had begun to turn — no longer dry but wet and awful, a racking, nasty cough accompanied by an octave-plus drop in my voice which left me sounding like a long-term pack-a-day smoker. I assumed that the cough had turned into a bronchial infection, and when I continued getting worse on Friday, I called my doctor back home and wheedled my way into an appointment on Tuesday afternoon.

Saturday, though, as I made my way through the subway, Penn Station, the NJ Transit train, the AirTrain, the Newark airport, the Houston airport, and so on, it started to become clear that Something was Wrong. My voice was almost shot, my cough was getting worse and worse, and I was exhausted, easily winded when walking, and just generally felt like crap. I got home that night, expecting to spend all day Sunday in bed assessing whether or not I could teach on Monday.

Sunday morning I woke up with all of the same symptoms as Saturday, plus the addition of horrible abdominal cramps, cramps which started just under my ribcage and twisted down through my muscles and organs without — well, without producing any of the expected resolutions involved in abdominal cramps. It was at this point that I started thinking, okay, what if this bronchial infection has turned into pneumonia, and what if it’s spreading into some more systemic infection?

I live alone right now. And so I had to get myself to the urgent care place while I knew that I was in reasonable shape to drive myself there, and to drive myself back. So I set about the process of getting permission to go to the urgent care place: I called my doctor’s office and left a message with the answering service, who paged the on-call doctor, who called me and said yes, she was worried that this was turning into pneumonia, too, and that I should go to the ER or to urgent care.

Nothing is simple, of course: the medical group that I’m assigned to under my HMO is in a dispute with the nearest hospital, which is now refusing to provide service to us based on the HMO’s refusal to pay a sufficient percentage of what it owes them. And I’ve never been to the next-nearest hospital — honestly don’t even know where it is, and didn’t feel like this was the moment to try to find out. So I ruled out the ER and started trying to figure out if a nearby urgent care place accepts my insurance; happily, they did, so I was on the way.

On one level, it turned out to be a good choice: Sunday around noon, the only patients in there were me, one guy with a lower-leg injury, and one guy trying to get a vaccination of some sort. So they took me right back, were able to do a chest x-ray then and there, did a pretty thorough examination, and wound up both giving me a prescription for antibiotics and high-end cough syrup and swabbing me for H1N1.

Here’s the downside, though; as of this morning, nearly a full week later, I still didn’t know the outcome of that test. The lab picked the test up on Monday, and I was told I’d have the results by Thursday, but I’d called every day since then to no avail. One key difference between “urgent” and “emergent” is, I guess, the speed of the lab results.

In the interim, though, I basically operated under the assumption that this was in fact H1N1. The antibiotics helped some of my symptoms very quickly, but not all of them, by any means. And the more I saw about H1N1’s onset — dry cough, followed by a brief period of feeling better, followed by wet cough and a sudden turn into feeling much, much worse — the more familiar it all sounded.

But I just got the results — 11 am, Saturday — and they’re negative. Which means I’m back to assuming that this is bronchitis, probably of a viral kind, since the antibiotics helped but did not entirely clear up the problems. And I think I may have bruised a rib with all the coughing, as one spot on my rib cage has just been killing me since yesterday.

When it might be swine flu, my course of action was clear: stay home and away from everyone until the coughing goes away. But now… it’s not swine flu, and the coughing’s not going away. Is the course of action the same? I was able to manage staying home last week — how, exactly, I’ll discuss in the next post — but I’m not sure I can do it again.

The semester started here just shy of a week ago, but because my classes fall on Monday and Wednesday, today’s my first real day of teaching. Labor Day. Usually (where “usually” = about 4 out of 10 years) classes here start the day after Labor Day; when they start the week before, we still start on Tuesday, and then teach on Labor Day. Which continues to make no sense to me at all.

I wouldn’t even mind that so much — I’m really fired up about my classes, which include a seminar on Marxism and Cultural Studies that I haven’t gotten to teach in several years, and a new class on television authorship; I’ve got piles of work ahead of me, but it ought to be great fun — except for the fact that I managed to get about two hours of sleep last night due to the stupid cough I’ve developed from the lousy air quality out here in the wake of the fires to our west.

The annoying part is that I’m actually getting better, just as I’m feeling worse. Last Wednesday afternoon, just after classes ended, I suddenly felt as though I’d chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes, and my lungs griped and complained for several days after. Now, my lungs feel more or less fine, but that incessant tickle deep in the back of my throat has set in, probably a sign of healing tissue or something, but it’s driving me batty. It will not let you not cough, though coughing of course aggravates it. It will wake you up out of a dead sleep to make sure you know you need to cough. And no combination of cough drops and throat sprays will calm it down.

This is not what I want to be thinking about right now, but the combination of non-stop coughing and lack of sleep have me unable to contemplate much else.

Here’s a bit of irony*:  Chest pain is a primary symptom of a heart attack.  A panic attack can produce chest pain that mimics that of a heart attack.  But other kinds of chest pain can produce the symptoms of a panic attack, as you freak out over what their cause could be.

The situation:  I went to the gym twice this weekend, for the first time in perhaps six weeks; after a several week layoff during all that travel, and then several more weeks of just doing Bikram yoga, I decided it was time to go do a little round of lifting and cardio again.  And it was pretty fabulous.

Of course, I’m sore as all hell today.  And I think I’m having a periodic muscle spasm/twitch somewhere in the muscles on the left side of my chest.  It comes and goes.  Jabbing or pinching, not pressure.  No other symptoms.  So I’m positive I’m not having a cardiac event of any variety.  And I certainly wasn’t having a panic attack, at least not until the stabbing pain inconveniently located Right Over My Heart began.  But the thought of what it could be produces the leading edge of the kind of panic that results in racing pulse, shortness of breath, and other symptoms that I really don’t want to be having right now, thanks much.

Back to work, so I can stop thinking about this already.

—–

* I recognize that this isn’t really irony.  But what is it?  A conundrum?  A paradox?  Colloquially, it’s a catch-22, perhaps, but what it is rhetorically?

I’ve been attending relatively regular Bikram yoga classes since late May, and it occurred to me yesterday that the time might have come to take stock of my practice and reflect on how it’s going.

I took extremely well to Bikram right off the bat; the intensity of the heat and humidity took some getting used to, but the poses were largely familiar from past yoga experiences, and, with a few exceptions, my body likes them.  I had a fair bit of soreness for the first couple of weeks, mostly in small connective tissues that hadn’t really been worked to that extent before.  Like the muscles that hold your rib cage together; most of my back was fine, but those tiny little muscles between my ribs ached like mad.

That soreness has since faded, as has the tendency to feel completely dopey and out of gas after class.  I’m still going to late-afternoon classes, mostly because that’s best for my summer work schedule, but I’m optimistic about my ability to attend morning classes in the fall and still manage to be functional during the day.

I realized yesterday that I’m learning something new—something small, but clear—at almost every class of late, that there’s some moment at which I make a tiny adjustment and the lightbulb goes off over my head:  “oh, that’s what he’s talking about!” Yesterday it was, in a couple of the back-bending postures, that I wasn’t really letting my head fall back as far as I could.  I thought I was; I thought that’s all the backward bend my neck had.  But, in fact, I was protecting something, keeping myself from letting go.  Yesterday, for the first time, I really relaxed, and really let my head fall back, and it completely changed the feeling of the poses.

There’s a lot of physical stuff left for me to work on yet—my hips, for instance, have always been a problem; they simply will not open.  But there’s also a lot of non-physical stuff that it would be good for me to focus on—how much of my ego, for starters, is bound up in the idea of being good at this; how much of my mind is focused on invidious comparisons with the other students in the room.  Physically, the bikram is doing very good things for me (honestly, between the yoga and the weightlifting I’ve been doing, I think I’m in the best shape of my life), but I could stand to let it do a bit more psychic work for me, I think, letting go of some of the thought patterns that protect me, too.

90 minutes is much, much longer than 60. It’s pretty rough at that moment, when my yogalates classes would have been wrapping up, to realize that there’s still a third of the class yet to go.

On the other hand, it all feels good, with the exception of my left elbow, which is a bit sore.

Which is not much to complain about, on the whole.

Holy moly. Having settled back in here in Claremont, and having spent the last five days mourning the loss of my beloved yogalates class, I managed to cart myself down to the Bikram place a few blocks from here. And I’m not sure I’m going to be terribly articulate about the class and how it felt yet—today’s state of yoga brain took a couple of hours to arrive after class ended, but arrive it did, apparently with enough supplies for a lengthy stay.

I’m positively dopey. In a good way.

Anyhow, class was amazing. The instructor was sitting at the front desk when I arrived, and was instantly welcoming, friendly, and informative, with lots of good advice for how to approach this first class. Even so, though, when I walked into the studio, I was immediately terrified—it was entirely like walking into a sauna, and I just couldn’t imagine being in the room for 90 minutes, much less doing strenuous yoga. But I adjusted to the temperature fairly quickly while waiting for class to start. And once class began, I was quite hot, and clearly working hard, but really fine.

It turns out that the yoga portions of the yogalates classes I was taking were quite Bikram-inspired; many of the poses were the same, as were several of the sequences. But because the class had a slightly slower pace, and of course because of that heat, I was able to get farther into several poses than I ever have before. And the way that the instructor talked us into and out of poses made me understand them quite differently than I have in the past.

The studio has a special week-long introductory rate, so I’ve got six more days pre-paid; I’m looking forward to seeing how these classes feel in the coming days. But I’m pretty sure I’m already hooked. The trick is going to be figuring out whether I can, say, think afterward.

The first one I’ve had in almost five years, I think.  I used to get one roughly every six months, until my doctor decided that getting my allergies under control would help rid me of the migraines.  Weirdly enough, it worked.  But the downside of not having had one for so long is that my migraine medication (which was back then one of the new -triptan varieties, which knocked the hell out of my last migraine) has gone totally out of date, and so Did Not Work.

(More below the fold.)

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You haven’t heard much from me about running since the marathon.  Mostly that’s because there hasn’t been any.

Actually, that’s an exaggeration.  I took a week or so off to recover, and then tied the old running shoes back on.  I ran once or twice a week for the next six weeks or so, but finally had to stop entirely.  My left arch, which began griping late in training, and which got seriously bitchy during the marathon itself, escalated its litany of complaint until I could no longer ignore it.  When I first started noticing that I had a left arch, it was because it would begin bothering me around ten miles into a long run; during the marathon, it started hurting around mile seven; finally, it hurt half a mile into a run, which was my signal to quit.

I went to see my primary care physician in late April—and I promise this post will not devolve into a rant on the failures of the U.S. medical system, though there are elements of that contained herein—saying that I thought my arch had fallen, and that I needed orthotics.  She took one look at my foot and diagnosed a fallen arch, referred me to a podiatrist, and sent me on my way.  I called the podiatrist’s office that day, but the first appointment I could get was three weeks later—the day after I was set to leave for three weeks in DC.  So I didn’t get to actually see the podiatrist (half my fault; half theirs) until early June.  But I went, gave them my co-payment, and saw the doctor.  He manipulated my feet, watched me walk around, and told me I needed orthotics.

Here’s the ranty part, though:  at the end of the appointment, he tells me that my insurance company—the same company, remember, who dictated to my primary care physician to whom she could refer me—won’t cover the orthotics if his office makes them.  “They have another lab they’ll want to send you to,” he says.  He’d be happy to go ahead and make them anyhow, though, for $500.  Being in a bit of a tight cash-flow period, though, I decide I’ve got to get the insurance company to pay for them, if they will, so I wait for them to call me with the approval information.  Which they do, pretty speedily in fact, and refer me to an orthopedics lab nearby.  So I have a little mini-rant built up here about why I got referred to someone who wasn’t going to be allowed to do the work, but I’ll let that slide.

I get an appointment with the orthopedics lab on June 21, and get re-diagnosed.  The orthotist who sees me, incidentally, gives me the most severe diagnosis I’ve gotten, telling me that I’ve done significant damage to my feet—and by extension, my ankles, knees, and hips—by failing to address this problem sooner, but he also gives me exercises to do to improve the problem, in addition to the orthotics.  He takes impressions of both my feet, says that the orthotics should be ready in five to seven business days, and that they’ll call to make an appointment when they’ve got them.  Which they did, but they couldn’t get me in to pick them up until today.

But now I’ve got them, big rigid arched pieces of plastic in both my shoes.  The orthotist says I need to break them in carefully, and let my feet adjust to them, so I don’t end up bruising my feet and making the whole thing worse.  And he’s told me that I have to hold off on running until I can wear the orthotics all day, every day, for a week.

But oh boy.  After that, I’m itching to go.

So I spent several hours yesterday having my boobs crushed in order to have various pictures of their insides taken.

Actually, it was only one boob, and the crushing part of the festivities didn’t last all that long.  For those of you who have not had this done, though, you should know that this medical procedure is like the gift that keeps on giving.  You’re aware that it’s happened for way longer than you want to be.

Anyhow.  This is the fourth such boob-crushing I’ve gotten to experience.  And I’m a mere 37 years old.  This does not seem to me to bode well for the future of my relationship with my breasts.

What follows is long, so it’s going below the fold.  Read at your own risk.

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So it’s clearly time to stop thinking about all this pointless, whiny nonsense about my “career,” and whether or not any recent markers of “success” or “failure” indicate that perhaps I’ve made some colossal “miscalculation” about whether I was in fact “meant” to do the thing that I’ve spent the last fourteen years or so of my “life” in preparation to “do,” or whether there exist such “inequities” in our prevailing “social structure” and “institutional climate” that no amount of “talent” or “hard work” on my part could possibly allow me to “achieve” the thing that I’ve been convinced that I “want,” when, in fact, it may well turn out that I just “don’t.”

Enough of that.  There are more important things for us to consider.

Like my toenail.

The nail of the toe that is right next to my big toe, on my right foot.  The nail which I discovered day before yesterday is in an advanced state of toe-abandonment, and is preparing to pull up stakes and light out for the territories.

Despite previous issues here described, I’ve never lost a toenail before, and I’m just not sure what to expect.  Interestingly, the one I’m losing is not the one I expected to lose; this one’s on a whole other foot, and is a normal toenail, as toenails go.  A toenail that has never given me a minute’s trouble.

The toe proper has tended to blister a bit, in recent years, when I run, on the top edge next to my big toe, because I think the big toe overlaps it a bit and rubs in an inappropriate way when I run.  So I’ve dealt with blistering and callusing and general nastiness, but that’s the nature of toes.  I never thought much of it, and just tried to keep after it with the pumice stone, when I could.

Post-marathon, though, once I could bring myself to look at my feet again—something I resisted at first because I wasn’t sure what state the toe I’d had trouble with before was going to be in—I discovered that, in fact, the nail of the bad toe had gone completely black, and there was a bit of blistering, and I thought, here we go, dead toenail walking.  I never expected the other foot to have gotten in on the act, but, in fact, it had.

The usual blister-on-edge-near-big-toe was there.  But the blister extended around over the tip of the toe, in a way I’d never seen before.  I didn’t think much of it at first, assuming that it would reabsorb, as things do, and I’d be able to go on ignoring that toe, as I have pretty much all my life, but for the pumicing.

Instead, the blister grew a bit.  Not much—no elephantiasis of the toe or anything—but just enough that it became uncomfortable.  Shoes were no fun.  So I did the thing one has to do with such a blister, and let me just say that it was nasty.  It turned out that there was a small pool of blood right under the edge of my toenail, but I got it drained out, and all seemed well.

Over spring break, I got a pedicure.  All of my toenails were a lovely red, and my calluses and blisters professionally attended to.

And because of the red, I had no idea anything was amiss, until earlier this week, when I noticed that my toenail just… didn’t look… right.  Like it was at a weird angle or something.  And I reached down to touch it, and it moved.  And the uncanniness of this can only be compared to that feeling of moving your tongue around a tooth, as a kid, and suddenly feeling that tooth’s edge separating from your gums, and knowing that teeth aren’t supposed to do that.

The toenail is about eighty percent detached, at this point.  The last twenty percent is not letting go, and—I say from unfortunate experience—screams like a mofo if you do something like catch it funny on a sock you’re trying to put on.  So the whole thing is band-aided over, until the inevitable separation finally takes place.

From what I can tell, what’s underneath is none too attractive.  This toe is not likely to see the outside of a band-aid for some time.

The stupid bloody toe from before, though, is soldiering on, as ever.  Toenail still black under the red polish, but going nowhere.

And isn’t that just the way of things.