When Trees Attack & Parasites Eat Your Lunch
We’re not going to write this one off as a complete loss by any stretch of the imagination, but let’s just call much of 2015 a personal rebuilding year. I’m putting this post out there to get it off my chest and move on. Hopefully you CAN’T relate but learn a thing or two or at from my experience or at least laugh at my expense.
The Bugs
Rewind to August 2014, when I made another trip to my island birthplace of Adak, Alaska following my 2012 adventure, this time with family in tow. We spent a marvelous week hiking, camping, spotting wildlife, exploring abandoned structures, drinking from fresh mountain streams…
That last part got us in trouble. Back in the ’80s it was commonplace to drink from Adak streams without filtering, but my experience would indicate that these days it’s more likely you’ll wind up with Giardia. A hefty course of powerful antibiotics (booooo) later and I was back on track!
The Gray
Oregon winter rolled around, and I found myself with a slightly more blasé outlook on life than normal. “I don’t feel like myself” became a somewhat common refrain, though I couldn’t put a finger on what exactly felt different. Hints of mild depression crept in, but I assumed it was the darkness and gray rainy days affecting me a bit more than previous years.
January 2015 brought a renewed intention to focus on mindfulness, yoga, and climbing, plus the opportunity for a weekend skiing getaway at Mt. Bachelor with friends. It was my first time at Bachelor, and though the year’s snow wasn’t cooperating, it was still some of the most fun I’ve ever had strapped to a couple of wooden planks.
The Crash
A long day of 20+ runs later, I caught the last lift and bounced my way down a mogul-y blue run. Towards the bottom of the run with the lodge in sight, I jumped off a small berm on the right side of the run for a couple feet of air and… disaster.
As I landed a bit forward-weighted my right ski pre-released (AKA popped off, which I deduced after was likely due to a cracked ski boot). In the next half-second that felt like an eternity, I stumbled and spun sans-ski while still moving at a considerable speed. As the slo-mo continued, I eyed the tree that I was going to impact and made a last ditch flail to avoid it.
I took the entire brunt of the tree trunk across both quads while landing on the ground, somehow avoiding my head, vital organs, pelvis, and knees, entirely. Immediately following impact, I felt pain more intense than anything I’ve experienced previously, to the point that I was seeing stars and wanting to puke without having impacted my head. After the near-blackout passed and extreme groaning ensued, I had the wherewithal to know better than to move right away for risk of having broken a femur and trying to stand up in shock. After some deep breaths and appreciating being alive, I slowly moved one leg, then the other. They tracked like they were supposed to, and movement didn’t cause additional pain. After a minute or two had passed, I sat up, then kneeled, then stood. With the pain a bit dulled compared to the impact, I even put my skis back on and slowly made my way down to the car, hoping I might be able to walk the whole thing off.
That hope quickly faded on the ride back to our vacation house, as the swelling that set in near-doubled the size of my legs. I spent the rest of the weekend in bed with legs elevated, icing constantly and drinking lots of water while looking for signs of rhabdomyolysis. Had ski patrol picked me up on the hill, I would have been put in the hospital for sure.
Back in Portland, crutches might have been useful were it not for the fact that I had zero good legs. Instead, I was able to hobble around slowly while making old man noises. Bending my legs past 20 degrees wasn’t happening, so stairs were pretty much out, as was sitting normally in chairs. I got x-rays to confirm that bones were indeed intact — which was likely thanks to spreading the damage over both legs instead of one. That left me with some severe trauma to what used to be some of my strongest muscles (there goes a decade of cycling strength) and significant bruising to the bone.
A week or so passed and my bruising became a work of art with my quad muscles resembling something like a bullet passing through watermelon while evolving and transforming for over a month. My quads were pretty much destroyed and needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The next 6 months of mental struggle, constant stretching and PT, massage therapy to break up stuck fascia and scar tissue, and exercise to rebuild strength and fitness finally got me back to a functional range of motion and decent strength. Today (11 months later) there’s still a weird lump or two, but thankfully my leg muscles once again have their normal shape and range of motion, strength is back, and I can go for a run without soreness and tightness the next day.
The positive outlook? Had I broken a femur, I’d probably still be relearning to walk.
The Departure
In parallel to all this skiing accident nonsense, what had been a great 3+ year run at Metal Toad having a lot of fun and contributing in a significant way to building the company from 10 to 50 people quickly became a lot of not fun and feeling trapped for reasons not worth getting into. “Runaway!” seemed like the unfortunate best course of action, so a March “reduction in force” with my name on the list was a rather convenient exit.
Were my mental and physical state stronger, I might have had the will to put up a bigger fight, but ultimately it was a good time for a change of pace. At least my blog posts live on, and I landed at a great new company!
The Bugs, Part 2
About the time I was walking semi-normally and had gotten past the shock of a rapid job change, things seemed to be back on track. Except that instead of feeling better as the pain in my legs subsided, I felt progressively worse. Energy was lagging, mood was mediocre at best, and brain fog set in some afternoons. That whole “I don’t feel like myself” thing was back, though I questioned whether I was imagining things since I was still overcoming injury and that potential impact on my mental state.
The moment that triggered me to take action was a June dentist appointment. After zero cavities in my 30 years, they found starts to three new ones in just the 6 months since my previous cleaning. Talk about a combined yikes/light bulb moment! I hadn’t made any significant dietary changes, so something else was impacting my nutrition.
A month of blood draws, stool tests, sensitivity tests, and all sorts of other fun stuff, we had a likely culprit: a second parasite named Blastocystis Hominis (AKA Blasto). Its symptoms are not particularly well-known or documented, but search some online forums and “brain fog” and “energy level” are common complaints. My test reports came back with “quantity: many” with regards to these little buggers. Oh, and there’s no treatment endorsed as effective by the FDA. Wonderful!
I worked with my naturopath to come up with a treatment plan that avoided more heavy doses of antibiotics (none of which were noted to be particularly successful with this ailment anyway). We settled on a hefty dose of oregano oil and very specific probiotics (20 billion organisms a day!) that like to attack bad bacteria — and a THREE MONTH course of treatment. That oregano oil dose was a doozy — a large enough daily quantity to be effective while hopefully not being toxic.
Good news! Within a week of treatment, I noticed a sustained lift in energy and a reduction in brain fog. That came with added (at times painful) intestinal side-effects from the oregano oil treatment, but it was worth it. The day-to-day improvements were most noticeable up front, but it has taken the full three months of treatment to see how bad things were at their peak and how “not myself” I really was. It’s so hard to see clearly what’s wrong when you’re in the middle of experiencing it.
I’m finally off the oregano oil which brought an energy lift of its own. My gut still has some healing to go, but I feel great—like myself again. The topic of gut health and its relationship to mental health is fairly new to the medical community, but I suspect the next decade will bring about many more really eye-opening studies on our digestive tract’s impact on our brain and entire body. If I wasn’t already a believer in health being a big if not the biggest factor in quality of life, I certainly am now. In fact, if I had to choose between reliving parasites or getting Tonya Hardinged by a tree, I’d pick the skiing accident!
The Good
So there’s the narrative that has been the overarching force on my 2015 to date. To put that whole mess in perspective, my outlook on the year would be significantly better had I been healthy. Let’s take a look at just a few of the awesome things that happened so far this year!
All that and so much more! Not bad, right? That’s exactly the point — mental and physical health put a damper on things to the point that I’m only now relearning how to fully enjoy these experiences in the moment. I’m just incredibly thankful that years of bike racing taught me a thing or two about pushing through some pain and suffering, because there was more than enough of that to go around.
What a perfect example of how on the surface all looks golden, but just like those studies telling you that Facebook makes you feel bad imply, there’s always more to the story than the epic vacation photos. I’m just glad this particular story of trial and tribulation is coming to a happy ending and setting up for a great sequel leading into 2015!
So, what did we learn?
- Trust your gut when it’s telling you something is wrong.
- When the thing that’s wrong IS your gut, trusting it becomes difficult. Seek evidence and outside opinion!
- Replace worn ski equipment before it fails.
- When you’re lucky enough to walk away from a skiing accident and have limited medical bills, invest the savings in new gear and get back out there (Mt. Bachelor trip 2016 penciled in on the calendar).
- When in doubt, filter your drinking water.
- Water sources in the great outdoors are ALWAYS in doubt. See #5!
Enough about me for one year! How has your 2015 been?
