So as not to suggest that I’ve not forgotten about it. I’m still processing my recent trip to England, Scotland, and Wales. I’ve got a post coming about it soon.
If you’ve read last week’s post, and might be curious…it wasn’t your typical, run-of-the-mill creeping crud.
Yup, after a couple of years of dodging bullets, I caught covid and let me go on a bit of a bit of a side-track here.
Aside from a time way back in my very late teens when I came down with Mono (Which put me to sleep at a Metallica concert), and recovering from cancer surgery, I can’t remember ever feeling so ground down.
Looking at the data, my resting heart rate while I was sleeping – which is typically in the low 50’s in beats per minute, spiked to 71 BPM. Again, this is while I WAS SLEEPING. My baseline resting heartrate during the day is around 69 BPM. My resting BPM for the past few days was 84.
Clearly there was some Battle of the Pellenor Fields level of shit going on.
At that time it was easy to rest. I couldn’t do anything else, though let me tell you, there’s a kind of guilt – I’m going to call it recovery guilt – that you feel when you’re not “Pulling your own weight” day-to-day.
For a while there, it was just my wife keeping the house running and, despite every bit of evidence (and there was a lot of it) that I needed to keep my ass planted and keep on recovering, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow slacking off. I mean, I’d moved past the point where I needed 12 hours of sleep, and naps. I’m here at my desk, writing a bit, playing games, scrolling through twitter (Which, in hindsight, might not have been all that good for me), etc. Why can’t I get up and, restfully, do some dishes? Maybe fold some laundry?
Now the important thing to keep in mind here is that this is ENTIRELY internal dialogue. At no time ever did I feel pressured to do anything outside of recover.
But those brain weasels, man…
Then, yesterday, I started feeling better and that, Reader, is where I mis-stepped. Naturally, if I’m feeling better, I’m clearly done with resting and should immediately resume all normal activities, right? No easing back into the routine. Who needs that? In fact, I’ve let slip some things that I should maybe stretch a little to get caught back up, right?
RIGHT???
Spoiler alert:
Ah, you’re a smart person, Reader. You already know the anser to that, so I won’t waste any electronic space on it.
Suffice it to say that one day of a little bit of extra activity around the house and I’m feeling it pretty hard.
I shouldn’t be surprised, having read the road map of what was going on prior to now, but the ingrained drive to DO ALL THE THINGS is really hard to shake.
Resting is hard work. The problem is that it shouldn’t be.
So I’ve caged the brain weasels (Again) and hopefully, I’ve stashed the key somewhere that’ll take me some time to find.
In the mean time, it’s back to taking care of myself.
Thanks for reading. Be safe out there. Be Excellent to Each other – and yourself.
I’ll see you on Thursday.
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