6. The bleach catastrophe
During March and April 2020, we were in lockdown, and the paranoia about the pandemic was at its peak. Everyone was obsessive about hygiene, and my mother caught the "cleaning fever" too: she started using bleach mixed with water to clean everything, to mop the floor, to disinfect the shopping bags and the outside of all food packages... By April I was already feeling weird with unespecific symptoms: my heart beated more intensely, as if each beat was much stronger than usual and resonated in my chest and neck, and sometimes I felt cold and had unexplainable chills even on hot days. I had stopped exercising in March because of a lack of free time, due to all the mess of adapting to online lessons, the immense amount of homework that professors threw on us, and so on, but in April I was determined to follow a calisthenics routine again. When I tried, I was surprised to discover that I started trembling right away even with the most basic exercises, as if I was making an immense amount of effort, which wasn't true. It felt as if my movements weren't smooth anymore, but instead made up of a series of minuscule discrete jolts, and I couldn't even form a tight fist with my hand without my arm shaking. I couldn't tense any muscle without it shaking. It was crazy.
I thought, oh well, maybe I'm tired, maybe I'm lacking some vitamins or minerals, so I thought it would be reasonable to postpone exercise until I could visit a doctor and see if this was the case. Because of this, all I did in terms of physical exercise between April and June was some dynamic stretching, and walking at high speed for one hour on my treadmill twice a week (as I said before, I get very short of breath too soon if I run, so I settled for half-walking-half-running instead).
Between April and May, I had an interesting symptom that I have yet to find an explanation for. Suddenly one day my right shoulder started hurting a lot, but it clearly wasn't a physical injury because doing push-ups didn't affect it (I tried doing some just to check if it was indeed somehow damaged). It had to be a nerve issue, or an accumulation of toxines, or who knows what, but not a real injury, because I hadn't even used my shoulder for anything important in at least two months. It went away in two weeks. By then I was determined to stop all sexual activity, since I now had no sports to counteract it with, but I relapsed once in the first days of May - and when the inevitable symptoms appeared, that very night, my left elbow started hurting immensely every time I bended my arm, as if I had ripped a muscle off or broken a bone. I almost couldn't use that arm to wash my hair that night, it hurt that much, but the next morning it was all completely back to normal, as if nothing had ever happened.
At the beginning of June, I developed exercise intolerance. I didn't realize at first that this was the cause of my symptoms, but one day I began feeling very sick after walking on the treadmill, had zero appetite, and got a fever and extreme weakness. I was puzzled, I had stopped all sexual activity more than a month ago, and I couldn't think of anything that was causing everything in my body to go haywire in such a sudden manner, and anyway, I had never felt so immensely tired during POIS before, nor had I ever felt random pains in my chest like it happened this time. Even lifting a spoon felt like a strenuous effort during the worst part of the episode.
After this, it all went downhill. That symptom I had when I was 10 years old before my POIS started, as if I couldn't regulate my breathing properly, came back stronger than ever, and this time it stayed. Most of the time I felt as if I was suffocating, with a horrible "electric feeling" right where I'd always had the feeling of nausea during my POIS episodes, under the sternum, as if electricity was passing through a nerve there, uncontrolled. The sensation of my heart beating too strongly evolved into a full tachycardia at random times during the day and night, and my usual extrasystoles, that I've had since I was a kid, got worse, more scary and more frequent. I visited a cardiologist, but he couldn't find anything that was wrong with my heart. I felt dizzy and unsteady, with a strange sensation of pressure in the middle of my brain, but it never affected my mental abilities, and I could carry on studying during the summer and kept my usual good grades. In August I started taking a vitamin-B supplement that a doctor recommended me because of my low energy levels, and during that time I relapsed and masturbated again. I'm not sure which of the two factors played a more important role in what happened, but the truth is, one night I woke up with a 140 bpm tachycardia, which eased into 120 bpm after a couple of hours and stayed at around 110 bpm for almost a week, with higher peaks in the middle of each night. It was terrifying, it felt as if my heart would never stabilize its rhythm, and would beat faster and faster until it gave out.
I went to the cardiologist again, but his answer was the same, nothing was wrong, even though he agreed that my heart rate was out of control and there had to be something causing it, but he was confident that it had nothing to do with the heart itself. I took my last exams in September and graduated in Physics, but I was still feeling terrible. It wasn't until the end of September that I realized, by pure luck, that it could be bleach that was affecting me so badly. And indeed, one week after we completely erradicated it from the house, the worst of my symptoms spontaneously resolved. But I was left with some after-effects that have changed my life:
- I can't generate enough heat to keep my body warm when the weather gets too cold. Even in warm weather, I have to sleep under a couple of blankets (I've slept with nothing on before, in the warmest days of the summer, or with just a sheet on me), or I wake up shivering and sometimes even with other symptoms like my heart racing.
- The exercise intolerance seems to be permanent. I can't even walk too intensely for longer than a few minutes or I get immediately sick with a fever, lack of appetite, inflammation in random places (last time it was my ribs), breathing disregulation, irritability and an intense headache that gets worse at night and makes me feel as if my brain was being compressed. I've tried running, push-ups, rope-jumping... and it all makes me sick in the same way, by doing only a couple of minutes or few reps of the exercise (30 rope jumps, or 10 push-ups, are already too much).
- Most of my strength is gone, especially because I can't make any physical effort without shaking, which makes it difficult apply force with any body part, to keep my balance when lifting something, to grip things tightly, and to coordinate my body properly. I bump into things a lot and look like a clumsy duck.
- My heart still beats too strongly sometimes, especially when laying down face-up in bed. It's very uncomfortable and sometimes even wakes me up at night. It gets better if I manage to get warm, usually by adding a ton of blankets to my bed until I start sweating. Masturbating is completely out of the question, it leads to episodes of out-of-control tachycardia, that always start in the middle of the night but sometimes happen during the day too, and also to that pain the left side of my chest appearing for a few days, without me having compressed that region by laying on my left side.
- I can't take vitamin B supplements. They give me insomnia, headache, irritability and restlessness. I used to be able to take them normally, and I'm not talking about huge doses that could make these symptoms reasonable. I've never had any trouble sleeping at night, but when I tried to take these vitamins again a couple of months ago, 48 hours later I spent an entire night in trying to fall asleep in bed and wasn't able to sleep a single minute. Two days after I stopped taking the supplement, my sleeping pattern was completely restored.
So, this is my life now. I can't exercise at all, I've lost most of my strength and all my progress in sports. I feel like I can't control my own body, this shaking with every movement that implies the slightest effort is infuriating, and I can't even play the piano like I used to. I have to study one more year at the Conservatory here to get my piano degree, and I don't think I'll be physically able to do it, since rehearsing some pieces at that level implies a lot of effort and is equivalent to, or even more intense than, an exercise session. It's already been 6 months since we stopped using bleach at home, so I don't believe these symptoms are temporary, but instead some sort of permanent after-effect of something that went wrong in my body because of the exposure to bleach. I feel stuck in a state where something is imbalanced, or working the wrong way.
