Cannot believe how long I’ve been off the bike, outside of commuting to and from work, just to prove I can (and sometimes barely making it).

It was a week ago last Wednesday that I started my journey with this bug, pretty much same timing as my wife, only worse for her since it was immediately after returning from two days at the hospital for lung cancer surgery. Not good timing to feel like crap. We didn’t know if it was the Flu or RSV; the only thing we did know is that it wasn’t Covid, since we could test for that.

I had almost a solid week of feeling so bad I couldn’t remember what it felt like to feel ok. I did finally feel a tiny bit better a week ago today, enough so that I went out and rode, slowly, last Tuesday morning, and was hoping that was the beginning of recovery.

It wasn’t. Most of the aches & pains were gone but in their place was a hacking dry cough that was almost incapacitating. Got bad enough for my wife (post-surgery) that she went to the ER yesterday to figure out what was going on. She had a bazillion blood tests and x-rays and in the end, it turns out to be the flu. Which puzzles me because everything I’ve read said you test positive for the first 4 or 5 days, and then it doesn’t show up anymore.

Thankfully the nasty dry hack has been replaced by a more-normal post-cold kind of cough (my doctor said it’s a typical post-virus cough) so the plan is to try and get back out there on the bike tomorrow morning and make it up Kings, inch by inch. Meantime I’ve missed probably the very best late-October/early-November riding weather ever!!! A lot of ground to make up.

I’m trying to look at the bright side of things. Normally Karen and I would be taking our vacation right now, but this year I picked a cruise that doesn’t have us leave until Dec 7th. Good thing, that.