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.

I am also pretty sure that when I opened up my tab to blog a couple hours ago, that is not what I was going to blog about. I remember having a moment specific to today that was an "oh hey that's actually a blog-worthy moment!" to talk about, where I would have something to speak about.

Unfortunately.

We are having family night tonight.

Which was sufficient distraction, as we watched It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Well, I half-watched it, half-watched the rerun of the league stream covering matches I wasn't awake for. Butyeah. About the sickness: I woke up with it, tried sleeping more...and more...and more...and it didn't go away and eventually I just realized it wasn't going away so I might as well get up.

And it's still here, now.

Soyeah.

I am sick.

Silver lining: my dreams last night were the best dreams I've had in a long time. Almost a full 12 hours later, I've since forgotten them and that's a shame because I know that they involved some sort of epic adventure (I vaguely seem to recall a dream about a two guys one girl trio where they started as ordinary three individuals, but became badasses, and yet somewhere along the line the guys got separated from the girl, where the guys kept fighting but the girl was forced into nobility life and when reuniting was disappointed that she'd fallen behind in badassery, but the guys felt that she just kept up in her own way because she was an utter badass in the royal court or something of that sort and the guys ended up officially being her bodyguards but her being badass enough to not really need bodyguards), but the details beyond that elude me.

God I hate how I feel so inadequate in these blogs.

So I was supposed to help with a belt test for tae kwon do this Saturday--by which, I mean. Not in four days, but three days ago.

I completely and totally forgot.

And the real stupid thing is.
I knew I would forget.
And there were any number of things I could have done to stop me from forgetting.
Telling my family.
Telling my girlfriend.
Blogging about it here.
Writing a note.
Anything.

But nope.
I didn't.
And so.
I forgot.

And wasted my time on Saturday.
I'm pretty sure the thing I did on Saturday was work on my civ 3 mod, nothing else constructive.
Something I could have done on literally any day.

So I am a complete utter idiot.

And I'm going to pay for it from my self-imposed punishment: 50 jacknives (apparently what I know as jacknives may not universally be known, but they are basically kinda sorta a combination same-time crunch plus reverse-crunch, where both the upper body and legs move upward at the same time), 25 knuckle pushups, and I later added in 30 (which I pushed up to 50 later) crunches.

Now admittedly, I did these in sets of 10/5, later adding the 10 crunches.
And of those knuckle pushups, pretty sure the first 15-20 didn't have proper technique.
And near the end of the jacknives, I could tell I was failing to do them with proper technique. (I made up for it by doing some in-air cycling, after I discovered neither a crunch nor a reverse crunch were faring any better than the jacknife.)

But this is still brutal. Especially since whenever I felt like I was recovered, I did more. I felt like vomiting was a possibility before I had even done any of the workout for the class proper. And I wanted to push things so that doing things in the class would be as difficult as was possible, while not being impossible. (I don't think I succeeded, but I got fairly close.)

It hurt, but it didn't hurt enough. It will hurt big time tomorrow (aint enough stretches in the worlds to keep the soreness from debilitating me tomorrow, aint enough protein in the world to properly fuel my regrowth), but it still wasn't quite enough of a punishment for my sin.

That's okay, overall, however, because my instructor more than made up for it. Not in her chastising of me (there was a small amount--not nearly as much as I deserved, but a little justified chat on the subject), but rather, the words which were meant to be an encouragement.

The words meant to be encouraging to me were a stab through the heart harsher than any of the words of criticism, in spite of being only a single sentence: "I appreciate your help." Meant to be genuinely reassuring; was actually a dagger twisting in the wound deeper, because she appreciates my help...and without warning, I wasn't there to give it to her.

For no good reason.

Because I forgot.
With no excuses.
I thought of making some.
I had some which I could create.
But I couldn't use them--in spite of having created them, I just couldn't use them. It just...was something I deserved to take in full.

I still think I got off lightly--lighter than I should.

I don't know what else I can really do to punish myself more than I did, but I basically got what amounts to a slap on the wrist. Jacknives are a white belt punishment. (Admittedly, more like 5-10 of them at that rank, and a punishment used with decreased frequency, butstill.) Knuckle pushups, can be as early as a gold belt punishment. Both are test requirements from green belt and above, doing 10 + 5/rank. (So at my rank, it's somewhere in the 20-30 range anyway.)

I'm out of shape, so I can do less than I should be able to do for my rank, butstill--these are things that ceased being punishments and started being part of my training literally years ago, kept as a punishment more as a relic to have something as a punishment.

​So I still feel bad, and feel like I should feel even worse in every way possible.