At this point I had been sick at home lying on a couch for hours on end with some still unidentified bug and it wasn't showing any signs of going away. In fact, I was still getting worse. I was coughing and sneezing up the equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. My body temperature was changing so rapidly that I would start shivering, put on a sweatshirt, then start sweating only to throw it away before I could even get it on.At this point we were quite certain it was no common cold. It was time time to visit my family doctor. I got my throat swabbed and was physically examined and the physician plainly said that I have H1N1 Influenza. How could he know this without running any tests yet, you might be wondering? Well, then I ask you, what other flu do you get in the summer? None. That's why the winter is called flu season, and why Swine Flu was caused so much panic among the populace. Everyone was getting sick in the summer. That's the winter's job this new flu stole! I was informed it's no big deal, just a flu, and so I get treated as if it was any other flu, meaning with an antiviral medication called Tamiflu. Unfortunately for me, it didn't help all that much and my state of being continued to decline to the point where it was the worst I'd ever felt in my entire life.
The pain started off simply as an especially severe form of normal flu body aches. Even though I'd been lying on a couch for weeks everyday it felt like I had just run a marathon. One big difference is that I found my legs weren't tender to the touch. The only thing that made them worse was standing or walking. It was so generalized that it encompassed the entirety of my legs and arms, so if a doctor told me to point to where it hurts I would have trouble. It existed from the bottom of my thigh to the top of my ankles. The pain worsened along with the illness and soon intermittent sharp stabbing pains started popping up all over my body. This flared up very frequently and felt like attempting to stand on legs that had millions of tiny knives embedded within it. Months later with testing we found out I had a secondary strep throat infection at the same time, which is a disease that can often cause neurological problems. This seemed to be the case for me because I quickly developed burning pain in my legs on top of everything else. As problems piled up it didn't take long for it to be too much for a previously healthy 14 year old to handle.
Parallel to my pain issues were my rapidly worsening sleep issues, insomnia for the most part. I only made it through the end of middle school because they cancelled my exams. When I reached high school my situation was worst than ever. Even when I forced myself to get out of bed I simply fell asleep in class. We began trying out different sleeping and pain pills. Lyrica was effective in treating only my burning pain, which was the least severe of my 3 pain layers. For some reason all the sleeping pills we tried weren't strong enough and it took many years for me to get to a dose that was actually helpful in any way.
What I was experiencing as a result of my uncontrollable coughing was a sense of impeding doom which was a first for me but not the last. Thankfully this period of time didn't last that long. My flu-like symptoms start going away except for the muscle pains covering my arms and legs. I didn't think much of it because it's common that the inflammation left over from getting rid of a virus can take awhile to die down. This pain still kept stopping me from returning back to school. This had my parents saying, "What the hell, why aren't you going? You're clearly not sick anymore, I can see it". It was true, the virus was gone; but the pain wasn't improving at all. I took anti-inflammatory medications to limited degrees of effectiveness. This led to a new theory, that I was was simply deconditioned as a result of my transformation into a couch potato for the three weeks I had the flu. This would supposedly explain why doing even minor menial tasks as simple as walking caused me such pain I accepted the possibility of what my doctors were telling me so we got me on a workout/physio routine. This wasn't to get a hot beach bod or sexy muscle tone, just to get my healtht self back. I started out using the weight machines in my basement and would soon evolve into a pro, but this would only solve a small part of the problem.
It was the last few days of grade 8, just before graduation. It was nearing the end of the school year for 8th grade and my flu symptoms were gone, except for that persistent full body pain. Working out was certainly returning my strength back to normal but it didn't improve my pain even a single iota. Oh well, there was nothing I could do. I toughed it out to go to the last couple days of school where I got barraged with questions, mostly concerning things like, "Where the hell have you been for the past 3 weeks?" I explained the swine flu infection I suffered and many went, "Oh my god! Me too!" It turned out that usually you only get it for a few days and is doesn't seem that much worse than a cold. The virus just liked my company I suppose, why was my experience so severe? I was so on edge from these new pains that I had a breakdown at school over unfairness in the science fair. Not because it actually upset me academically, it was almost all from pent-up frustrations regarding my health at this point I still expected the issue to resolve itself soon.
Except it didn't. The leg pain remained and never went away, even for a moment. The pain slowly diminished in my arms and so I found myself working out almost entirely with my arms. Grade 8 was finally over and camp was soon approaching. I no longer had any flu so infecting my camp friends wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, as you might imagine, one does quite a bit of walking at camp. When any use of your legs results in your nerves saying, "You have the nerve to stand up? Sit the hell down!" coping becomes quite difficult. Staying at camp in 2009 proved to be an immense challenge but I survived by skipping out on many of my favourite physical activities
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