As veteran song smiths, AC/DC, said in their memorable song, I’m back and I’m back in black. For those of you wondering if I have got the wrong site then please bear with me. I haven’t posted here for a while but for those of you who don’t know my story here’s a little précis.
In July 2002 I developed the worst headache I had ever had over a period of 10 days. People commented that I was looking really ill and that I should go and see my GP if I didn’t feel better. On the 13th July my wife couldn’t wake me up and the next thing I remember is being taken out of the house by an ambulance crew. The day before I had picked my mother in law up and brought her over to ours and the last thing I heard before I was ushered out the door was my mother in law saying ‘well how am I going to get home now’. Talk about possibly missing the big picture.
Lumbar puncture, severe viral meningitis diagnosis and almost dying during the night followed in pretty much quick succession. Off work for six months, away from triathlon for 5 years (I could swim but not bike or run), left with an acquired brain injury, several after effects, intolerances to caffeine, cocoa, alcohol and phenylalanine (it’s in sweeteners in diet drinks mostly) and madder than Mad Max McMad who has just completed his degree in being as mad as hell. I wrote several blog posts about my experience just in case it helped anyone else recovering from VM.
Then in 2010 I was diagnosed with Mollarets Meningitis which I worked out after 3 years to be caused by stress. So stress triggers recurrent VM attacks but I can’t drink, eat chocolate or have coffee. Ho hum, onwards……
You might have noticed that I slipped in there that I was a triathlete when was taken ill and my fitness was credited as being the reason I rallied when I was ten minutes away from having my relatives called in to the hospital. My parents were told I was unlikely to make it through the night but they didn’t tell my wife, not sure why.
Fast forward to 2012 and I completed my first half ironman triathlon to celebrate being a 10 year survivor or as my daughter put it ‘you want to celebrate almost dying by nearly killing yourself’.
At that point I didn’t realise I had an undiagnosed double kidney infection and it wasn’t until I collapsed two months afterwards and was rushed to hospital that it became evident that I was in trouble. Infection was dealt with and I started training again, raced another half ironman in 2013 and all was well, well apart from aching all over and asking my wife to beat me with a shovel until I stopped saying I would enter the half ironman the next year.
It was shortly afterwards that I started to get recurrent kidney infections, then I discovered I had kidney stones in both kidneys and at one point I had four concurrent infections. I missed the 2014 triathlon season and entered a half ironman for 2015. All went well and I raced the triathlon in 2015 but was somewhat surprised to collapse when I got home after the race. Rushed to hospital and diagnosed with a single kidney infection. More antibiotics, lots of tests including one which involved what looked like a garden hose with a 1980s camcorder on it and a female medical consultant with a sense of humour failure. I had that many x-rays I was starting to glow green around the edges and the authorities wanted to put a Chernobyl style 100 mile exclusion zone around me.
In December 2015 I had a cancer scare when my PSA was found to be 9.8, so high in fact that the consultant said if I didn’t have cancer he would be extremely surprised. Cue consultant being extremely surprised but following an invasive biopsy I was found to have an e-coli infection. Just before the diagnosis came through however I was rushed into hospital with………..sepsis, bet you didn’t see that one coming! I spent the best part of Christmas 2015 in hospital.
2016 I thought, well that can’t get any worse. Ever heard the expression ‘smile things could be worse, so I smiled and blow me down, things did get worse’.
I had an operation to laser the kidney stones, six in total and was told that I would be ‘in and out in a day’. Well actually make that in and out in 5 days, it went wrong and I had a 2 foot long stent inserted in the wrong place which caused me crippling pain. So with the sepsis and operation which went a bit wobbly that was 2016 season dead and buried too.
2017: a year which had all the hallmarks of being a great one right up until I contracted severe pneumonia, sepsis and had bleeding into my right lung. I had run two half marathons (13.1 miles) one in March and one in May. After the one in May I started to get weird symptoms like my heart rate escalating on its own (besides from when I was looking at my wife, she has always had that effect on me) and feelings of hypoxia. My GP, ever the optimist, told me that I had a heart condition and that I couldn’t possibly have pneumonia because my oxygen saturation was at 96%. He told me to keep training and I did.
The symptoms became worse and the tests on my heart became more thorough but revealed no abnormalities. Not to be deterred my GP ordered a whole batch of new scans and tests all which revealed my heart was in rude health (not sure what polite health is though). In the end out of exasperation, and with my breathing so laboured I couldn’t climb a flight of stairs without a rest, he booked me in to be assessed at the hospital emergency assessment unit.
I was having feelings of déjà vu from my time with VM.
First a nurse listened to my chest and did my blood pressure, she then scurried off and came back with the registrar who listened to my chest, shook his head and went off. He came back with the departmental consultant who told me I was ‘very seriously ill’ and that I needed to start treatment immediately. It transpired I had severe pneumonia in my right lung and between my diaphragm and that it was pushing up against the lung causing pulmonary bleeding and a clot to form. ‘Look on the bright side’ he said ‘the pneumonia is stopping the clot from moving’. Every cloud.
I was admitted within 15 minutes and put on multiple drips, several injections and kept on close monitoring. Apparently the pneumonia had been present for 8-9 weeks and I had not only trained with it but completed a half marathon too. By training I mean several 40-50 mile bike rides and runs between 5-8 miles on a regular basis. Apparently I was ‘hard core’ and the reason my oxygen sats were so high is because I had been training and my cardio-vascular system was doing its best to compensate. So that’s the second time my fitness had saved me, if I hadn’t had been so fit the advice was I would be in intensive care and with limited chances of coming back out again, well who would have thought it. Oh and I contracted sepsis again just for good measure.
Back into training, all going well, entry for the 2018 half ironman of my choice completed and I come down with flu, a cold and then pneumonia again in February. At which point my wife said to me ‘are you still going to do half ironman races when you’re better’ to which my reply was ‘well yes’. This was followed up ‘well why don’t you just do shorter races because you’ve been so ill’ and I said ‘well, where’s the fun in that’. My somewhat bemused wife asked me if I ever listened to myself before I say these things and in particular whether I realised I was about to say something ‘really stupid’. She may have a point. My eldest daughter commented that ‘only her dad could be disappointed because he can’t suffer for 7 hours’.
So where am I going with this and why is there a picture of me in a wetsuit looking like I had just swum in a river? That’s because on August 20th 2018 I had just swum 1500 metres in a river and was on my way to collect my bike to head out on a 27 mile ride. Just because a triathlete is someone who doesn’t understand that one sport seriously is really enough, I then followed that up with a 7 mile run. Not quite a half ironman but having had three years away from the sport, to quote Waldorf and Stadtler from the Muppet Christmas Carol ‘it’s good to be doing anything again’.
What I didn’t mention, and I didn’t mention it to anyone before either just in case they tried to persuade me to give up triathlon, was that in August 2017, in hospital, the consultant told me that I would most likely never race triathlons again.
Winston Churchill once said ‘I fancy a cup of tea and a biscuit’ he also once said ‘when you’re going through hell, keep going’. Well I think I did.
So if you’re struggling to recover from VM and you can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel the moral of the story is, just keep going. Don’t let anyone tell you that you won’t be able to do something and if you want to do something badly enough you’ll do it.
It’s my privilege to be both a volunteer Community Ambassador and a Believe and Achieve Mentor for Meningitis Now and of course my sporting exploits are raising money for them via uk.virginmoneygiving.com/Tr...
Thank you for sticking with me and remember when life throws you lemons, throw them back twice as hard!
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It's been a rough 21 years since I had Viral Meningitis
