Running In the Time of Pneumonia

I’ve been sick with a persistent cough for about a month now, but last Monday it turned into pneumonia. I learned this from my doctor, but I could have learned it by rereading the blog post I wrote about Dracula a few hours before I went to the doctor, which clearly shows me losing control of my faculties. I was completely out of commission Tuesday-Thursday of last week, and since then I’ve been yo-yoing back and forth between feeling like I am just about healthy and feeling like I’m getting sick again and am going to end up in the ER. But yesterday, I went back to the doctor and had a second chest x-ray, which showed that the antibiotics I’ve been taking have successfully cleared up the infection, so I have empirical evidence that I am recovering nicely. The cough is still hanging around, though, and every night I have to chose between the real threat that I might wake up coughing in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep for hours, or taking the prescription strength, hydrocodone based cough syrup they gave me and then still being groggy and have asleep through noon the next day. Good times.

But, the good news is I’ve been cleared by my doc to start running again. Last week I was struggling to walk the dog around the neighborhood, and when my cough got worse over the weekend I was worried that running would make it worse, so I didn’t try. I have official approval to pick back up, so I’m going to hit the road this afternoon and put in a few miles. I was supposed to run a 10K next Saturday, but I decided today to drop down to the 5k instead since I’ve missed over a week of training and my lungs are on shaky footing right now. Depending on how things go, though, I might pick up a different 10k the following weekend so I can really start working on getting my mileage up. We can add “walking pneumonia” to the list of bummers for the year, but we can also add it to the list of things that haven’t derailed my running project. Onward!