Brilliant Friends,
I got sick last night. Super sick.
After dinner, I grabbed some oranges to slice up and found one of them covered in mold. It was sitting on the edge of the fruit basket and didn’t seem to affect the other ones, so I tossed it, cleaned a couple other good-looking oranges, and didn’t think much of it.
At about 5 a.m., I woke up from an unbearable leg ache. I had a training session with squats yesterday, so I thought that was the cause. After about ten to fifteen minutes of squirming around, though, I knew something was wrong. This wasn’t normal aching from lifting. It was really pronounced, and I thought maybe I had gotten a poisonous spider bite or something. A few minutes later, I started getting the chills and shakes. Damn. I was dealing with a full on infection.
The shakes quickly became shudders and uncontrollable, and I was whimpering like a baby. What the hell? Was it really that orange mold that was killing me right now? I finally got the courage to get out of bed, stumble through the dark, and grab my bottle of vitamin C. I took 4g with some water, and crawled shivering back into bed.
The shaking wouldn’t stop, and after a few more minutes I started to feel gas. I thought maybe I would stool and all this craziness would end. Long story short, nothing got better, I ended up puking up dinner and all my vitamin C. I had a fever at this point. I downed four more grams of vitamin C, some coconut charcoal pills, and sea salt, and thankfully got to sleep after a while.
Waking up at about 8:30 a.m., I felt much better. I had a throbbing headache, but the chills and fever were gone. The beauty of vitamin C and charcoal. Ear plugs helped with the headache, and I resorted to taking two small ibuprofen pills. These are a last resort for me, since I rarely get headaches, but today was pretty intense. I got out of bed, made some butter coffee for my sweetie and stored some away for myself for later, and went back to sleep.
At 1:30 p.m. I got out of bed, a little shaky, but okay. The headache was still there, but aside from weakness, the other symptoms had gone. I busted out my thermos full of butter coffee, sat down to read a book, and started feeling better and better. The headache was subsiding as I nourished my swollen brain with gracious amounts of ketones.
By 3p.m. I felt like 75% of my best self, and I had some food to replenish my stolen dinner. This week I’ve been enjoying sweet potato with salted butter, just laying the butter on top cold. I had that with some olives and eggs, and of course a few more grams of vitamin C. All told, I took 10g vitamin C, 6g of which I held down. I’ll probably take about 8g more by the end of the night.
At 5:30p.m. as I write this I am at about 90%. Might even be able to hit a PR later tonight if I had to. Just kidding. But damn it feels good to be back from that hell hole.
I navigated past a similar episode of infection last year, where I caught a pretty bad flu from work and fought it off by the next day. Random infections like food poisoning or the flu don’t have to last longer than a day. Do the effective things, pound the vitamin C, charcoal, and whatever else can counteract the source, and get good fats as quickly as you can keep them down. Salvation is often in your trembling hands.
All told, from 5a.m. to 4p.m.:
- 10 g vitamin C
- 2g coconut charcoal
- 400mg ibuprofen
- 24oz butter coffee
- 4tbsp grassfed butter
- 1tbsp C-8 MCT oil
- 1tsp cacao butter
- 1tbsp grassfed collagen powder
- 1tsp creatine
- 1/2 stick vanilla beans
- 2 cups single origin coffee
- 1 small sweet potato
- 2 tbsp grassfed butter
- 3 olives
- 1/2 cup scrambled eggs (totally random, didn’t have any soft-boiled eggs left but found fiancee’s leftovers)
To powerful living,
Steve
The Brilliant Beast Blog 