Epstein-Barr or Bust

I saw my doc today to go over my lab results from two weeks ago. I had asked her to test me for any and everything because I was still not convinced that all my fatigue was adrenal gland related. I don't work 80 hours a week, I don't have three kids, I don't work on Wall Street. My life is pretty stress free. So she agreed that there could be a virus behind it all and tested me for Mono, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), Lyme's disease, and Celiac disease.

When she opened my file she looked at me and said I had the highest levels of Epstein-Barr that she's ever seen. Then in the most serious tone I've ever heard from her she said, "You need a month of bed rest and you need to stay off that bike."

Wha??? I told her that I've been feeling really good though! I've even thought of going back out to the track to play around and to start a bit of running to get the legs ready for CX. She was totally perplexed at how I could be feeling so great with these numbers running through my blood stream. "Well, ok," she said. "If you're feeling better then you must be doing something right. Just keep taking it easy and listen to your body, but don't go overboard. If you're recovering this well you should be back in no time."

Whew. Evaded that sentence. Continued prescription of fat-and-lazy therapy plus lots of good vitamins and weekly shots of a vitamin cocktail in my rump.

So what is the EBV and how did I get it? I may never know how this happened. It's a chronic, mutated form of the regular Mono virus, which I must have picked up at some point, months or years ago. When the body is put under unrelenting stress, it wells up as the EBV. Most people are put on serious bed rest and it takes months to recover. I can't imagine what my numbers must have been like back in May when I was so fatigued it left me in tears. How I've managed to recover is a mystery. Chalk it up to mass dosages of boyfriend endorphins.

One theory is that I may have picked up some Mono while down at Katrina last fall, and then some sort of stress over the winter or spring made the EBV flare up. What kind of stress? Hell, all I was doing was training for track (well, maybe racing cyclocross, drinking a lot, not sleeping much, and continually asking my body to perform all winter could be added to the equation). Nothing I haven't done before, but my immune system may have been compromised enough to make me so vulnerable that my body shut down. My doc said that in conditions like the Katrina response, the body's immune system is extremely vulnerable to infection, and heaven knows we were living and working in very abnormal conditions. EBV happens very often in emergency personnel and the military. In fact, she said that the Gulf War Syndrome is thought to be linked to the EBV, and the Iran hostages from 1979 developed the EBV. Once they were set free and brought home they were able to make a recovery.

Now I'm not putting myself in the league of Gulf War veterans or political hostages. If I got this from doing some good in the Gulf Coast, I can live with that. Just getting the word out that it's a very common virus linked to high stress and can mask as a plethora of other ailments. Now I'm on the road to recovery and riding my bike. Lots.

A winter of this may have had something to do with it