and how are we feeling this fine day?

I had rales again last night, but that was it. The crackling noises went away the moment my torso was upright in space. Last night's sleep was also the best I'd had in a couple of days—not perfect, but certainly better. Maybe that triple whammy of traditional Korean health enhancers (plus the tiger-milk mushroom and red ginseng) had a real effect.* I'm slowly learning the parameters of this new condition even as I try to establish a sort of infection/symptom timeline. So here I am, thinking out loud again.

I got COVID in mid-March, which makes it close to a month since the initial infection. I had been doing the staircase workout fairly faithfully: it began as a 30-day project that took up all of January, then continued as steady (if not daily) work from February to the first half of March. Then the COVID hit, and it completely threw off my rhythm: I could feel, even at the initial five-day "infectious" phase, that I wouldn't be able to hack doing the stairs. There was breathlessness, and there may even have been some slight heart murmurs and palpitations, but it was nothing serious, and I was otherwise totally functional. So that period could conceivably have been a time of very mild myocarditis. Then came last week, with my two severe attacks: one on Tuesday, and one yesterday. Between the two attacks, the symptoms let up enough to allow me to do a walk home; this took the better part of an hour as I took a longish route. There was one small hill (a ramp up) that winded me, but on that day, I was otherwise fine. That was Wednesday; on Thursday, symptoms were creeping back, but the full-blown relapse happened on Friday. I now know better than to think that a day's peace counts as a recovery. I'm going to have to think in terms of weeks and months.

Today, as I'm typing this, I'm feeling fine but a little tentative, as if heart murmurs lay just under the surface of my current stability. I'm about to walk down the street to the local Subway to grab a yangnom lunch of about 1600 calories, and that will be my caloric input for the day. That walk will show me whether my constitution is solid or easily thrown out of whack. The walk is 360 meters out, one way, so a round trip isn't even a kilometer.

Assuming continued stability and recovery, there's the question of how to get back on my feet. The impatient part of my brain would like to get me back doing stairs right away. This is partly because of what I'd learned about myocarditis, weak ejection fraction (heart-pumping force), clots, and the effects of clots. A strong heart is obviously key to avoiding a second stroke or a first heart attack. But at the same time, at the cellular level, my body seems to be whispering that the brute-force approach might not be the best approach for the nonce. It might be better to get back to distance walking first, then maybe do a combination of distance walking and stairs by following the Yangjae Creek path, which has those more or less evenly spaced staircases. The weather is much nicer at night now, so the creek/stairs approach is plausible. Then, after a few runs of that, I can hit the building staircase again and build back up to my former intensity. I'll be about a month behind my original schedule, but what does "behind" mean in the cosmic sense? The only one "grading" me is me.

So! First things first. Subway. Not the greatest sandwiches, but they'll do. I ate almost nothing yesterday, but I'm hungry right now.

__________

*I'm not actually against traditional remedies if they work. I judge them subjectively, i.e., purely based on how they affect me. I make no further claims re: how they might affect other people. If they work for me, though, then I have no problem with them. In the 90s, when I was in my twenties, I remember one day when I barely managed to make it into class. I was sick with something. My students saw how woozy and weak I was, and they asked me whether I was drunk. I made it through the morning class, then went back to my place (a yeogwan room I was renting at the time), and collapsed on my bed. Not long after, there was a knock on my door: a student had found me, and she had brought along a package of traditional meds she'd gotten from a Korean pharmacy after she'd described my symptoms to the pharmacy's manager. The package she gave me contained a small glass bottle of some sort of elixir, plus several packages that contained a mix of pills and herbs and woody-looking plant fragments. The student advised me to just take everything, and I blearily thanked her. I immediately downed the meds, and I shit you not—in the space of just two hours, I was absolutely fine and full of energy. To this day, I think that may be as close as I've ever gotten to experiencing a miracle. My Korean buddy JW heard this story, laughed, and cautioned me not to apply my experience to every aspect of traditional medicine, and from a scientific perspective, he was right to warn me. But the experience itself carried its own impressive force, and to this day, I wonder why the ROK government did away with traditional pharmacies. In the 90s, the Chinese-med pharmacies existed side by side with the Western-style pharmacies (or maybe they were hybrid pharmacies; my memory is fuzzy). Nowadays, it's nothing but Western stuff, and anything vaguely hinting at traditional medicine—like mushroom powder—is sold only if it meets Western standards. Frankly, I find the traditional Chinese way of doing medicine to be a bunch of hocus-pocus (recall that ancient Chinese rulers imbibed potions made from cinnabar, a mercury ore, for years, thinking it might give them longevity; it poisoned them instead, as mercury tends to do). But trial and error inevitably results in hits as well as misses, so no, I don't discount Eastern remedies outright.