"It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop."
— Confucious
The night before we embarked on BayCycle I left a message on my allergist's cell phone. I had a budding sinus infection, and it made me glad we weren't flying on our vacation. But I prayed she wouldn't direct me to the nearest urgent care clinic, where I feared I would contract something even worse in the waiting room. To my relief she said to just keep doing what I'd been doing, and within a day my sinuses seemed to have recovered. However.
However, when we arrived at Denise & Kim's last night and started to set up our things in their guest room, I had an allergic reaction to their cat. First I started coughing, but my asthma inhaler took care of that. Then my ears started plugging up, and by the time we were ready for bed I had the most painful earache of my life. Warm compresses helped but I couldn't keep that up all night. It took a long time to get to sleep and in the meantime I was up and down so many times that no one in the house got a full night's sleep. Well, except maybe Louie the cat.
In the morning, warm compresses and decongestants calmed the earache but did not clear the congestion. Instead of riding by the Richmond Marina as planned I spent the morning running errands (pharmacy for more ear ministrations, bike shop about the wobbling wheels, etc.). I caught up with My Beautiful Wife (MBW) in Pinole for a cupcake break, lingered over a latte in Hercules, and caught up with her again in Vallejo. She had ridden up and down huge hills and across the bridge over the Carquinez Strait. And since she had not had a good night's sleep either, she was running out of steam and out of patience for Vallejo and its commute traffic.
We looked for a decent restaurant but ended up with fast food, then loaded MBW's recumbent onto the back of the car above the trike. After checking into our room in Napa, I applied more warm compresses to my ear and then crashed and slept for an hour and a half.
The ear? Still ringing, but I think the pressure may be going down. If it's not improved in the morning I'll call the doctor again. In the grand scheme of things, it's not so bad now that the pain has subsided. Nothing that should keep me from completing BayCycle 2009.
Here's MBW's post on Day 3.
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