My earliest symptoms

I’ve talked already about my diagnosis and how I find out, but going back even further than that I can start to see where it began.

Back inn 2019, I worked for 10+ hours in a gym with little to no A/C. In all reality, I didn’t mind it. It built resilience. There’s just something about building both mental and physical resilience that goes a long way. Long days in the heat but I never had one single issue. I’d have plenty of fluids and just chug right along.

Bring on 2020. Despite working 2 jobs due to the Covid shutdown I thought I was doing pretty good. I did start to notice though that if I laid down on the couch, it was really hard to get up. Not in the sense that “oh I’m a little tired” but in the sense that “holy shit, I need an 8 hour nap.” There was a considerable difference in how I felt compared to the previous year. I was also getting light headed really easily. Something that wasn’t ever an issue before.

Due to the light headedness I had been keeping track of my blood pressure and had noticed that it was dropping over time and getting pretty low from time to time. I’ll admit that I was on some blood pressure meds for years for high blood pressure. I have a family history of high blood pressure and I know that my bodyweight contributed to that. As a personal trainer I moved a lot to begin with. I would probably average 12 to 15,000 steps everyday. When I started working two jobs that jumped up to 20 to 25,000 steps everyday. I had initially thought that my drop in blood pressure was due to the excess cardio. My weight dropped a little bit, going from 220 down to 212-215-ish, but when I started the blood pressure meds I weighed 215.

After discussing it with my doctor, we lowered the blood pressure meds to see if that would help my fatigue and my light headedness. As we were getting into the hottest part of the summer though, something happened that I had never experienced before. I was training a client and just found I could not cool off. All my normal tricks just were not working. I eventually just started to overheat, got nauseous to the point of throwing up in the trash can between my client’s sets. I had to lay down in front of the fan and just struggled to pull it together.

That should have been my first inclination that something was wrong. I had been working in that same gym for several years with no trouble, but now I noticed that things were just getting more and more difficult. I was more fatigued than usual, motivation to workout was waning, and just having problems with my overall recovery. I was still however training and my own training was really really well, but I was doing my own training much earlier in the day. So I just kept thinking that my own troubles were attributed to working 2 jobs.

It wasn’t until after the summer and my stomach (later found out my spleen specifically) was in some real pain and other little things started to manifest themselves that I really got worried. Getting my doctor more involved was the best decision and getting the ball rolling on getting some more in-depth tests started. The rest, I’ve discussed in previous blog posts, but these were my earliest symptoms when I look back.