Bend and Brew

Bend and Brew is a weekly yoga class on Saturday mornings at Crystal Coast Brewing.  The brewery opens its doors early for the class, and a mixed group of yogis spread out their mats on the floor for an hour of yoga, followed by a cold beer.  We have attended this class in past years and have met some wonderful people and been guided by some good instructors.  We both practice yoga (Martha more regularly and more skillfully than I), we both like good beer, we both appreciate the benefits of yoga.  And yet, it is Saturday, and neither one of us is bending or brewing.  Instead, we are hunkering down in the condo on a stormy and windy day, recovering from the flu. 

Martha began to experience some symptoms on Tuesday, and by that evening was suffering from severe headache, a deep rattling cough, nausea, night sweats, and fatigue – the entire arsenal of the slings and arrows of outrageous influenza.  We both had the flu some 20 or 30 years ago and well remember how thoroughly devastating it is, and we have faithfully gotten our flu shots each year since then; but of course while the vaccine will reduce the severity of symptoms, it cannot prevent it.  We were at a table with many complete strangers on Sunday night, and my guess is that’s where we contracted it.

Fortunately, I did not have any symptoms at first (other than the feeling that I was “fighting something off”), and was able to provision us with groceries.  I even had time for a three-mile run on Thursday morning before taking Martha to an Urgent Care Center where, after a very long wait, she was diagnosed with Influenza A and prescribed three different prescription medicines.  She definitely did not have a good night despite the medicines, struck down with a headache more severe than she remembers ever having – “the sickest I have ever been in my life,” she said.  By Friday morning, I knew I was also coming down with something, but my symptoms were much milder – sneezing, unstoppable running nose - and I returned to the same Urgent Care Center where I also tested positive.

We are both feeling somehow better now on a blustery Saturday afternoon, wind and rain shaking the palm trees wildly and a turbulent surf roaring out in the ocean.  I had ambitiously planned to begin the first week of the New Year with a three-mile run (the only part of the plan which I miraculously completed), weight-lifting at the Sports Center in Morehead City, a five-mile run, and Bend and Brew.  Martha had a similar plan.  We both feel cheated, here in our first week of our Sabbatical and a New Year.  But as Robert Burns famously said, The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley.