It's now 7PM and still warm. I had to take my outer shirt off. It was even warmer this afternoon. I went to Naked Lounge this afternoon and lounged in 72F weather. A lot of people were out on this sunny Saturday afternoon. The air was so pleasant, it took me an hour to get off my butt and come back. (I'm looking forward to the summer in Sacto -- it'll be hot and I'd like to find out how it affects my CFS).
It appears my post-flu struggle is over. I looked at my activity log and it seems to have ended on 2/28, about 2 weeks after the flu was over. It is the same amount of time it took to get over the struggle after the flu shot in 2016. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe low grade inflammation persisted for 2 weeks after the flu was over. Or maybe I'm forcing myself to find a pattern. I was looking for the end of one-day-up-one-day-down pattern. And it ended on 1/28 when I went several days without a down day. After a down day on 2/1, I took 7500 steps and then 5500 today. So the struggling pattern is definitely ended.
As for the post-trip struggle, my theory now is that the trip triggers inflammation that takes 3 weeks to fully dissipate. Healthy people either don't feel it or recover when the inflammation goes down. CFS patients, on the other hand, continue to feel the the full 3 weeks while the low grade inflammation persists. This also gibes with the depression as an inflammation disorder. (Post-vacation blues are commonly understood as depression). How credible a theory is that? Well, I'm now boldly predicting that they'll find the inflammation marker in people who suffer from post-vacation blues. And, if the test is sensitive enough, it will reveal that the low grade inflammation persists for 3 weeks. And my theory is likely to be true if that prediction comes true.
One could ask: why don't people feel the inflammation effect while travelling? My answer is that their tolerance to inflammation goes up while they are aroused. For CFS patients, that also means the crash threshold goes up, or perhaps even removed. I'd like to test that out the next time I travel. I'll finish 2+ mile hiking over 600+ feet elevation and see what happens. That ought to be enough even for people without CFS but extremely out of shape. And that is more than the Navajo Loop that I did not finish last September because I didn't want to get sick while travelling. If I make it at a decent pace, I could claim that the crash threshold is entirely removed while travelling. I'll have to continue to travel 4 more days afterward though, and taper down. If I quit travelling right after the hike, the inflammation will be high enough to trigger the crash or worse.
Finally, I'm making a slow progress in analyzing my trip data. I got tripped up on last year's February data when my Fitbit went kaput. It took me 2 weeks to replace it, so there is a hole in the tracking data. I spent a couple of days to figure out the best way to deal with it and settled with filling it with NA. That done, I'll resume the data analysis tomorrow.
