Ouch!!!!!!

Have you ever ran a long way? Not a sprint, but running an adequate distance where you feel the lactic acid build up in your legs. Where your sides get stiches and your lungs are burning? Normally this happens of course during ultra's (never done one but I assume so), marathons (definitely felt it), halfs and of course shorter distances when you're out of shape, like me. My first run in almost eight months yesterday had me feeling like that. I mean two miles is really not that far but if you're not used to it it can put a hurtin' on you. The aftermath though I have always found to be a little bit (well a lot) worse. Not using muscles for an extended amount of time and then putting them through their paces in me at least leads to an aftermath of feeling about 85 to 90 years old. A little hunched over. That special little twinge in certain movements. Unpleasant but damn it you do know you're alive.

My wife was worried about my run yesterday. She suspected that I was going to do it (run that is). I had been champing at the bit for months and especially in the past week since I got the IV tube out of my arm from the 12 weeks of antibiotics I had to take for my good friend streptocuccus pneumoniae. Her worries were not for my muscles or lungs. Her attention was rather focused on my neck. The infection as I mentioned was in the bones of my neck. A particularly hazardous space since it holds the spinal cord and all the wondrous things its responsible for. The neurologist whom I spoke with, but the drugs have left the conversations a foggy memory, said a few times I believe that he doubted and hoped I would not have see he and his surgeon partner. That would mean things had gone very bad with the antibiotics during my hospital stay and they would have to cut me open from the front of my neck to get to the back (yeah didn't make sense to me either,) to drain the area, take a biopsy of the bone and perhaps remove the area and graph bone from somewhere else into the spot. It was quite an eventful five days in the hospital with the usual few good nurses, plethora of bad nurses, weird 2 a.m. wake-ups for vitals, visits from the aforementioned neurologist as well as our primary doctor and the infectious disease specialist who actually was the last word in treatment. If not for the previous two emergency room visits it might not have been so bad, but of course repeatedly visiting a hospital doesn't instill confidence in modern medicine nor in hospitals.

But, I did run two miles yesterday and today I hurt. Not my neck which is fine but rather the muscles that I used. Which is a good hurt and one that I sorely missed. We will see what tomorrow brings. I bet I have a few miles in me.