I strongly suspect that I am heavily depressed and perhaps a bit sick. I'm really not motivated to do the things I should be doing; all I feel like doing is playing games and watching things and even there I am horrifically behind on everything. Like, it was only today that I watched RNG versus Fnatic and there's still like five matches I need to watch...and guess what? By the time I am up tomorrow, there will be plenty more.

​I suck.

The one I failed yesterday. Turns out there's one spot, an area, where even just walking...I have a lot of trouble breathing. The air is robbed from my lungs for whatever reason. We can speculate what it is all we'd like, but it's there, and it's a thing.

I told my teacher about it, saying that I could probably train myself to overcome it, maybe, hopefully, more or less. (I probably didn't sound too convincing. How could I? Knowing the area there's a problem, and knowing that there IS a problem, doesn't mean you know how to fix it, it just means you know there's a problem in an area.)

She offered the alternative of testing on a treadmill.

I feel like that's cheating--but I don't really have much choice other than to accept it, because with me as I am now...this is probably my only shot at it. Frankly. I don't think I will get any physically stronger. I'll be going the other way. Weaker and weaker with time.

I know that I can do it on the treadmill. The test is a nine minute mile pace, scaled up: 1.75 miles in 16:15. Now treadmills work in MPH, but if Google's translation metric works out as accurate (turns out I'm not the only one needing to convert "X minute mile" to MPH or for that matter KPH), then 7 MPH would be more than enough.

Six, while it is supposed to be "running" according to the treadmill, is basically a jog for me.
Seven is a slight run. Slight. But it can be done easily.

The most problematic parts of using a treadmill: the sheer boredom of 15 minutes of monotony, combined with the instability whenever I climb off of one. I can be walking at 2 MPH--WALKING--for FIVE MINUTES, and feel dizzy when stepping down from them.

But while these things are things that are annoying, they're manageable. They can be dealt with.
So I can do it.
I can pass.

Even if the method of passing feels like cheating.

And, yes.
I do know that I could've made the run on the normal course if not for that area taking all my breath out.
When I did the walk, I did it in 26:15. Ten minutes higher than the target time, but I was walking. Walking, at half the speed I'd be running. If you halved that time, you'd get the estimated time of what I should be capable of doing the run in. 

Using the treadmill, then, almost, almost feels unnecessary. Almost. But...I only have the one chance to pass now. One last shot at passing. And I refuse to fail it when I know that I am capable of passing it. Mental fatigue can make me think "I can't do this". But I felt my body.

My legs were fine. When I stopped because I couldn't breathe, they became like lead weights and today they are sore, but in no way shape or form was I unable to use them at the necessary level.
My arms were fine.
The only problem was my lungs, and it was only in the one area.
So I know I can do it especially if bypassing that area via using a treadmill.

I do need to constantly reinforce the facts. Tell myself the math. Tell myself all the pieces of the equation which I know are there. Tell myself "You can do this Bree". Point out all the reasons why I should be able to do it. And then quash the "who am I kidding, I can't do this" doubt which comes up. Push through it, say, "Yes, I absolutely can do it", realize I can make it, that I can pass. That's all I need to do.

And while i admit. That mental state isn't easy to achieve.
I know I can do it.
I will do it.
​I have to.

And I am going to be in hell because I am sick​. Hoh boy am I sick.

I had a really, really, really lengthy blog planned for today. As much about family stuff as I could think of (the guy who fell is fine, by the way, thankfully enough), but also a lengthy blog about a couple of things I've been toying around with. As a reminder, we leave tomorrow. We're supposed to be gone by 10 local time (which is 8 my time), which means being clear before then which means eating breakfast, packing, and leaving before then. Probably in six or so hours by my guess.

I wanted to stay up for like four of said hours, so I thought I had the time to blog here--even when going on the best date with my girlfriend as is humanly possible given the circumstances (no sound available to me). But while I want to sleep as much as is humanly possible on the trip tomorrow...I'm not sure I can pull it off. I'm fighting off the urge to sleep as is, and have been since before midnight.

Kinda sucks. I feel like in spite of not having set my watch to local time (I've deliberately kept it at my time). In spite of going to bed after midnight my time (which is after 2 am local time) and waking up as late as was humanly practical. That somehow, in spite of me taking every precaution against it. My body has acclimated to the new timezone and is treating this as 2:45 instead of 12:45.

That, or being sick leads to tiredness and tiredness leads to continued sickness and sickness leads to more tiredness...

Butstill. I shouldn't be falling asleep so easily so early. And yet here I am, struggling to stay awake.

Oh well.

Won't get the blog I wanted to give and given my track record, doubt I ever will. But it's the thought which counts.

A common traveler pitfall. Normally, you'd associate said pitfall with flights; they are known to be the breeding ground of the perfect recipe of bacteria. Environment's right even if they sanitize everything...and they sanitize nothing. But most of those conditions? Still apply to traveling in a car across half the country in 28 hours' time continuously. So it should be no surprise that I am siiiiiiick.

Annoyingly enough. My vitamin C pill's one of the few pills I did not bring. It's a pill I don't take daily, but have at home to take whenever I suspect sickness, to help shorten the duration of it and the strength of it. Normally have it; today I do not. So the only treatment I have is time...and in this foreign environment, not the best of things there, either, considering we leave on Monday. 

All in all, socializing seems to be so-so at this event. I was miserable when I had to constantly run from the smokers, but later in the day that proved to be less of a problem. There was an incident at the gathering, though. One of the steel benches tipped over after a couple sat down on them...and they went down with the bench. The guy hit his back hard, as well as bumping his head on the back of another nearby bench.

I am trained to respond to spinals, even on land. This was a textbook spinal. But I felt powerless to help him. The extent of my training for spinals, after all, is pretty much "stabilize the spine, and wait for EMS to arrive for them to take over care". There's a little more to it than that, asking questions and whatnot, monitoring the patient, and so on and so forth, butstill. In practice, I didn't feel like I could do much.

After EMS came, he declined to go to the hospital eventually, but some time after they left, other family members there managed to talk him into it. A good thing, too, because while I can't diagnose him for certain...he was showing symptoms of something being wrong. Possibilities include having suffered from a heart attack (possible if the sudden impact caused a type of ventricular fibrillation), or more likely in my opinion, shock...a possible body response to internal bleeding (something an EMS responder might not notice but which they would probably see at the hospital).

When the injury happened, while he remained conscious, initially, he couldn't talk; his hands seemed to not be able to make full motion; he was incredibly shaky; he was sweating profusely; he later said that he was having trouble breathing. Like I said, my contribution was mostly minimal, in strongly recommending to go to the doctor, helping him out, monitoring him between the time EMS left and he was talked into going, the like, but I still feel like I should've been more decisive, more helpful, voiced my opinion on things to someone who could relay it on, something more than what little I did.

Ultimately, I know it doesn't matter much; he still ended up going to the hospital, there was a hospital less than five minutes away so I'm pretty sure he's got good treatment, there's probably nothing I could have done which would have helped him more than he got help especially given his initial stubbornness (he really didn't want to go to the hospital and my training basically tells me to respect patient's wishes so I am trained to not try and push them, more or less), but it still makes me feel kinda like a fraud.

I've got training in first aid. I've got training in how to deal with spinals, and deal with spinals at every staff meeting. (Speaking of which, there was one today that I couldn't attend for obvious reasons. I'm considering cheekily/half-jokingly telling my supervisors that in spite of not having been at the staff meeting I still got practice in spinals.) But if that training doesn't allow me to help someone when it's actually happening for real outside of training...it's kinda disheartening. 

I was asked afterwards since I was the closest one to the incident and saw it unfold start to finish if I was okay, the expected concern being that as a witness I'd be traumatized. The trauma isn't in the event having happened; I am trained for things like that happening. The trauma is in knowing I am trained and yet feeling like a bystander who is untrained. Which makes me feel like a failure, to be honest.

Specifically.
I am running into a problem.
I am getting really tired, randomly--I have a theory; it's probably due to me being sick. Solution to sickness: sleep a lot.

Except...
...I am having trouble sleeping longer than six hours.
Heck, I am having trouble sleeping even six hours.
I'm waking up earlier for no good reason, when I need the extra sleep. And I can get an hour or two of extra sleep, if I am lucky, but it's still interrupted sleep that amounts to being poor-quality of extra rest, leaving me just...in a vicious three-part cycle. Where I'm tired due to being sick, yet can't sleep, and not being able to sleep makes me more sick, and me being more sick makes me more tired, and yet in spite of being tired I'm not able to get that extra sleep in.

I'll be trying again tomorrow, with pretty much the same thing.

Tae Kwon Do, into work.

I'm feeling better today, and think that whatever the problem was, it was something that won't be there tomorrow. But it's hard to say for sure. I'll be going in under the same conditions; 5 hours of sleep and getting up way too early.

If the problem was sickness that I no longer have, I'll be fine; if the problem was sickness that isn't showing today because I had a rest day today, well tomorrow will suck too unless it's gone by tomorrow; if the problem was something like food poisoning then I'll be fine; if the problem is just that there's something fundamentally wrong with me that causes me to feel really really sick and vomit after light exercise (no seriously the exercise I was doing as part of tae kwon do was something which I should be able to do pretty much in my sleep, it's so easy; I do worse than what we did then often enough)...well then.

Guess I'm really screwed then.

So tomorrow will help me narrow things down quite a bit. If I am fine, then the problem was sickness I no longer have or food poisoning but either way it was a one-time thing that means nothing's to be concerned about.

If I'm not fine tomorrow, then the problem's either sickness I still have or something is just fundamentally wrong with me and neither option is a particularly pleasant thought to face. (It's never a good thing when the better of the two options is "I am really really sick".)

Anyway, I'm typing this just before heading to bed, so.
​Gotta sleep now!

I was right that today was gonna suck.

I was wrong about the reason.

I woke up today feeling really sick. I ignored it, because I always feel a little bit sick in the morning, so what's a little more sickness than I usually feel? It usually goes away anyway, and even though this sickness persisted, I thought it would just go away once I hit an hour I normally wake at.

I went to the Y for my tae kwon do workout, and the sickness briefly felt gone...but then it got worse. Much, much worse.

And ultimately?

I vomited.

Only once, but that's because there was nothing else for me to vomit up.

I have had brief periods where I thought it was just a momentary sickness. That I was making it up, that it was not as bad as I thought, that I was just having bouts of sickness and was actually just fine. Periods where in that bout I thought that I would be fine, I would recover, I was actually well, and I could go on with my day.

...And then the waves of sickness hit me strongly as a reminder that no. I am not imagining it. I am not exaggerating it. I am not making it up. I am not temporarily sick. I am just flat-out outright sick. Sick to the point where I can't even drink water without the risk of vomiting. No joke, I put a single mouthful of water into my mouth...and then immediately spit it out when my body warned me that if I swallowed it wouldn't stay down.

Reflexively I just knew.

Just...ugh, I'd have preferred the suckiness of working to the suckiness of vomiting-sickness.

So I've been lucid all day.

Mind you.

Today's a fairly short day. I woke up at some time after noon.

I go to bed shortly after midnight. (Well I could stay up until 12:30, but I'd prefer to have six hours and change, as to allow me the guaranteed six hours, rather than exactly six hours which usually means I sleep less than six hours. And having half an hour extra gives that comfortable cushion of extra time.)

Twelve hours isn't exactly the shortest of days, but a usual day is like sixteen to eighteen hours. Sometimes up to twenty, albeit rarely. So the true test is having a day like that.

Yet all of today.

I haven't been tired!

As far as I can recall, no need to nap, no having taken a nap, no heavy reliance on caffeine, no more caffeine than normal (in fact, probably less!), and having had caffeine early in the morning...it has long since worn off (I had it almost 12 hours ago and it only stays in you for half that amount), and yet.

No tiredness.

No exhaustion.

Now, that's not to say there's no problems.
Stress is there, from a self-inflicted hell of my own making. (Basically I undertook a wonderful project, but one which I am simply put...rapidly finding is something incredibly hard to execute.) Fatigue from working on it for three hours straight is there as well; I needed to do something else with the rest of my day because of how much it took out from me.

Guilt's there for feeling like I'm not doing a good enough job, and all of that, but like. These aren't long-standing problems that have been plaguing me forever. This is just a problem which is my own fault for having taken it on and thinking arrogantly that I'd be able to do it far easier than I actually can. (It's much harder than I thought.)

Which isn't mind you in of itself even a new problem; I do that sort of thing all the time, where I start something thinking it'll be easy, a breeze, a cakewalk, but end up learning that it's a ridiculously hard task. One which I hope will be worth it in the end tho!

I MIGHT be sick.

Sickness does many things, sapping strength among them making me super duper tired.

So, just going to try and sleep it off, take a nice long shower tomorrow to hopefully also help.

​We'll have to see.