I Thought Spring Was for Hibernating

I had planned to write a post excusing myself from this blog, but my body had other ideas. I don't plan to abandon this blog because, let's face it, the asthma is going to come roaring back at some point and I'll suppress again. I'll need someplace to rant and rave about the misery. However, I had thought I would step back a bit and enjoy the lull.

There's a lot going on. I need to focus on my writing and develop other business ideas. We want to do a light remodel of the kitchen (new counter and floor) which means I need to produce the funds with writing. One house guest has left, another has arrived. The school board approved our exchange student. So, you know, I have a life and now that I'm able to get up off the couch, I want to go live it.

However...something is UP. I don't know what or how much of a problem it is going to be, but things ain't right.

First, my cortisol was not low. Or rather, it's only low for alternative medicine. No one else would find it low. I was not too concerned about it until last night. (And really the issue isn't what my baseline cortisol level is, it's the lack of the upper reaches of my stress response....something there's no real ability to test anyway, not until it completely fails.)

Second, I've had some loss of appetite. I've forgotten to eat several meals in a row more than once now. I haven't been able to finish what is on my plate fairly regularly. This is not good. It's an old school sign of adrenal insufficiency. (Don't worry, I'm still fat. F*ck you insulin resistance.)

Third, we went for a family walk, which, when you have young children, can be code for 'outdoor scream-a-thon'. My kiddo tires out easily, freaks about bugs and walks with her generally test the limits of our patience. They also progress at the speed of a crippled snail.

We could probably handle twenty minutes of the balking, but she manages to stretch it out to 45 or 60 minutes. If we didn't want to emphasize exercise as a family value, we would give up. We still might. Love my kid to the moon and back, but I could do without the behavior on walks.

To get my heart rate up on these excursions, I do some interval training. Light jogging. Some galloping, Chasses interspersed with walking. Nothing too major. Right now I'm out of shape because our vacation ended up being a bigger fitness detour than I anticipated. Mostly I've been walking 2 to 3 miles a day and am just now adding in these light cardio intervals (which only cover a mile).

Everything seemed fine. I'm careful not to push myself too hard. I don't want an injury, don't want to trigger the asthma and don't want to use up too much of my precious energy. So I hold back as a general rule and work my way up very slowly. Since I felt okay immediately after the walk, I figured I'd managed all my weird parameters okay.

When I went to bed later that night, I started to feel very ill. Post exercise adrenal ill. Severe nausea, burning stomach pain and lots of GI distress. I managed not to vomit, but was up quite late afraid to move or breathe too deeply lest I lose it.

Today I am loopy as hell, tired and weak, all the energy just wrung out of me.


Ah ha! I just ad an insight. I've been tapering the inhaled steroids. That might be the trigger here. AND I just realized I've been having some unusual muscle pain which would be consistent with steroid withdrawal. Oh wow. Phew. Look how much writing I did before I figured that out. That's how slow the synapses are today.

So I might actually feel better by next week.  Boy this post just did a 360 didn't it?