Every November, hibernation calls and I get extremely tired. My energy plummets, I can’t stay awake after lunch, and I sleep a lot.
“Where’ve you been?” A friend once asked me as I tried to keep my eyes open to type a response back.
“I think I have mono,” I said.
I later learned that it wasn’t mono, because I’ve spent the past two weeks dying from that particular viral infection. While Covid-19 started spreading across the world, I apparently had gotten the wrong virus. What seemed to start as a bad cold suddenly escalated into the sore throat from hell. I could speak but I couldn’t swallow without gathering up all my willpower and courage to face the searing pain. My doctor thought it was strep but after a throat culture was taken via much gagging, the test was negative. He gave me some fever reducers and told him to tell him how it goes.
The medication didn’t exactly work; the fever was relentless and persistent. It would seem to fade, then come back full force at night. I spent a lot of time either sweating or shivering in bed.
During hours of consciousness, between Googling mono to confirm that I was now going to live with crippling fatigue forever, I’d tell my friends via various chat platforms that yes, yes, I was fine. I questioned the veracity of those statements as I laid in bed listening to podcasts and trying not to swallow, wondering whether living off GariGariKun popsicles popsicles – “soda” flavored popsicles with a smooth exterior and a crushed-ice textured inside – can be defined as fine.
When you take the bigger pandemic into consideration, I am doing fine. I have a known, confirmed-via-blood-test virus that has some end that does not involve pneumonia and/or death. But there’s little comfort in this, because at the very least, if it doesn’t kill you, corona virus doesn’t enlarge your spleen and sideline you from physical exercise. When a slight soreness started at the bottom of the left side of my ribcage, I knew: Mono had switched my goals for the year from a bodyweight snatch to all the other nonsense that’s involved in trying not to get fat without exercise. With Covid-19, I may not have been able to breathe, but I would have been able to lift within a couple weeks.
Since the pity party I threw myself about lifting, I’ve slowly been getting better. As of writing this, the throat pain and fever are gone. I’ve graduated from subsisting off GariGariKun popsicles to Dole fruit popsicles. My lymph nodes and tonsils no longer scream and sting from the acidity of the tiny frozen fruit desserts, which I’ve begun referring to as the micropenis of popsicles. My appetite is slowly coming back but I get tired easily.
The mono is probably a blessing in disguise. I’d left my weightlifting gym at the end of January and hadn’t definitively joined another. Weightlifting plans were up in the air given the scarcity of gyms in Tokyo where you can drop weights, and the entire thing felt like another re-run of what had happened with cycling in Japan.
Except, even with all this fatigue, forced time off, and other bullshit, it feels a little more hopeful this time around. I’ll be back.