Body woes

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything on this canoe and kayak training blog.  The main reason for that is that lately very little canoe and kayak training has taken place around here.

Back on the evening of Tuesday, November 20, I started feeling some discomfort in my abdominal area.  The feeling was still there the next morning, and when I tried to do a round of the strength routine I found I had very little energy.  I concluded that I must have some kind of mild stomach bug and my body was fighting it off.

For the next several days I felt not horrible, exactly, but very low in energy.  I didn't do much more than lie around the house during this time.  Then I started to feel better, and thought I was on the mend--pretty typical when you've got a virus, right?  But the moment I began to resume some normal-life activities, the discomfort returned.  I decided it was time to go see the doctor.  I went in last Tuesday morning and they referred me for an ultrasound procedure and also took blood for some lab tests.

By Thursday the tests had come back negative, and my doctor told me the next step was to have a CT scan to see if there was some kind of mass in my insides.

A mass?  As in, a tumor?  Seriously?

I have to get pre-certification from my insurance company before I can have a CT scan, so I'm having to wait until Thursday to get it done.  (Note: if I had just gone to the emergency room they could have done the scan with no pre-certification requirement.  And there I thought I was doing the right thing by going to my primary-care doctor instead of the emergency room.)  I sincerely hope that my thoughts of tumors and cancer are just me blowing things out of proportion.  But in the meantime I'm still not feeling well and I don't know what else to think.  By tomorrow evening it'll be two weeks that this has been going on.

It's hard even to describe how this feels.  Much of the time it's a perpetual feeling of having to use the bathroom (sometimes Number One, sometimes Number Two) even though my digestion and bodily functions have been working just fine throughout this period.

Saturday was a beautiful day and I decided to try paddling--if nothing else, the cabin fever was driving me mad.  I paddled for an hour and felt just fine in the boat.  I didn't do anything bold; I stayed in the harbor because a south wind was making things rough out on the Mississippi, and even though I was feeling good enough to paddle at a healthy clip, I didn't throw in any all-out sprints.  Once I was back on the dock I was happy to have gotten out and done something with my body at last.

By Saturday evening, as if on cue, I was back to that mild lousy feeling.  It continued all through yesterday and I'm still not feeling so hot this morning.

It's still early in the offseason, so if I have to go through a forced layoff, I guess this is about as good a time as any.  But not knowing how much longer this is going to go on is frustrating.  Right now there's nothing I can do but see what the CT scan reveals this Thursday.