Hospitalisation

A spanner has been thrown in the works. Last Friday (Sept 14) I ended up in hospital for a night. From the morning of that day I felt a bit off and gradually, over the course of the day, developed some abdominal pain and nausea. By 4:30pm, I was throwing up regularly and the abdominal pain grew significantly. My partner took me to emergency and I was admitted with a high fever, also.

I was placed on a drip, they gave me morphine for the pain, some medicine for the nausea, tested my blood and urine, took x-rays of my torso and monitored me all night. None of which seemed to provide any indication of what had caused this combination of symptoms.

In the morning, the doctor came by and said that there was no sign of infection or other abnormalities showing from the tests or x-rays. He didn’t think it was food poisoning either but a possible explanation was inflammation of the glands through the stomach region.

The main thing is, within a few hours after being admitted, I was getting better. My fever was coming down, I eventually had some cordial to drink and I didn’t feel like bringing it back up and I got a few hours sleep. I even stomached some breakfast in the morning.

The whole episode was a little scary. It seemed to come on quite suddenly but it has left me with symptoms of a cold – runny nose, congested sinuses, sneezing, tickle in the throat, phlegm  – which have slowly subsided in the past 6 days to the point where I will now start minimal training again today.

In hindsight, I feel there is a good chance I can put the whole saga down to overtraining and running myself down into a state of vulnerability and stress. Not so much a sign of the amount of training I was doing, instead, the lack of rest I was taking. Not staying in bed that extra hour or two occasionally when it was really hard to get up. Essentially, not listening to my body as closely as what I have stressed to do in my previous Blog posts and masking the fatigue with coffee.

However, there are some other possibilities to what may be causing these symptoms, in-particular, the continued unsettled feeling in my stomach. I believe, in the couple of weeks leading up to my night in hospital, I had become more relaxed with parts of my diet. Notably, eating cakes, crumpets, extra bread, white pasta, etc. in an effort to satisfy my caloric needs but this may be causing me undue stress on my digestive system. I had been consuming a more wheat/gluten free diet prior to those slack couple of weeks. It had resulted in me dropping about 2kg, mainly through lost bodyfat, which has been a goal of mine in the lead up to this season. I had been feeling very strong during training and happy with my gut function. I had, previously, made minor changes to my diet over the past 12 months to help my gut with bloating, gas and constipation but I had lost sight of this improvement and how I reached that point, initially.

I will focus heavily on my diet over the next couple of weeks to see if I can get my gut back on track. It will mainly contain the basics of lean meats, vegetables, salad, fruit and nuts. I will continue with my oats as my main source of carbohydrate and use rice occasionally as a gluten-free, carbo-loading food for long weekend sessions and races, provided it is a successful method for my stomach. I have 2 months to get it right.

This has happened at an interesting time in my build up to the Shepparton 70.3. It is at the beginning of my big build up to race fitness but I will be almost 2 weeks behind with this enforced lay off. It will mean an adjustment in my training, altering build weeks and rest weeks. I will explain all of this in my next post and hopefully I will be well and truly over this illness by then.

I must regain focus across the board to ensure I reach my race goals!