Over the last couple months, I’ve been on a new medication that has given me the primary side-effects of drier skin along with more joint and muscle aches. One of the potential side effects is horrible sunburn, so it’s probably for the best that I’ll be doing the majority of this course of medication during the less sunny months of the year, but the losing battle I’m fighting against keeping my skin from drying out and bleeding all the time has me wondering if maybe it’d be better to have waited for the spring when the heat wasn’t on full-blast at work. I mean, the humidity dropping into the single digits in my workplace is rough enough during a normal year and thowing a medication side-effect that is causing my skin to dry out in places it never has before (namely my face, though everywhere else is also drying out worse than it ever has before) has me feeling pretty exhausted most days. Which might also be another side-effect of the medication I’m on, but that’s difficult to say one way or another given my penchant for insomnia and that moving through the stiffness that accompanies the joint aches requires more effort on my part than moving around usually does. Still, given why I’m taking the medication, it’s probably worth it. After all, these side effects are a temporary problem and the medication will hopefully fix a long term issue (and all signs to point to it fixing that issue, so far, even after only two and a half months).

What I’ve learned over my winter break is that I need to avoid skipping my workout routine. I wound up trying to treat my complete exhaustion by not working out for a bit during the start of my holiday vacation, but I gradually felt worse and worse as the days passed. Initially, some of that was a result of how sick I felt when my daily tension disappeared and the pressure that was holding me together vanished so quickly I had no choice but to briefly fall apart. As the two weeks passed, though, it became clear that there was something else going on. Given my potential exposure to Covid (due to visiting a friend who turned up Covid-positive two days later) on top of the rise in cases in the US, I thought that might be an explanation since I was also feeling a little sniffly, but all my Covid tests have come back negative and I discovered that I’d forgotten to refill the water well in my CPAP machine, which tends to make me extra goopy since I’m getting dry air forced through my nose all night rather than the appropriately damp stuff. Once I’d elimiated everything else, I pushed myself into a workout and discovered that, despite feeling like absolute shit for two days afterwards, when I needed to do was keep my body moving so it didn’t have a chance to stiffen up.

Now, a couple days into my full workout routine, I can feel the difference. Sure, my muscles ache a bit after being put to heavy use (especially heavy given what I’ve been up to at work these same couple days), but my entire body feels looser. My joints are still achey, but they don’t feel stiff anymore. I don’t know that I’d say that I feel better than I did before I restarted my workout routine, but I no longer feel like my body is slowly seizing up and that’s pretty great. I don’t know how far this feeling of relief will carry me into my workout routine (I doubt it will make it through next week, when I’m working out every day and also doing ten hour work days again), but at least I know that I need to keep these workouts as more of a priority than I usually do. That won’t help me feel better about doing them, but it will help me convince myself to do them regardless of how I feel and, after half a year of struggling to keep my workouts consistent, I think I need that more than anything else.

Though I can’t wait to spend my weekend moving no more than I absolutely must, I think I might work a bit of a longer walk or some stretches into my calculations of how much moving I MUST do. While I definitely think I need to avoid my full workout routine so I can do a bit of recovery over the weekend, I also think it would be bad to go back to my old routine of just puttering around my apartment and going on a single thirty-minute walk each day of the weekend. I need more activity. Especially since I still need to fix my sleep schedule. I got plenty of sleep over my vacation (as much as I wanted, anyway), but I didn’t manage to fix the timing of when I slept, which means I’m already too short on sleep for my own comfort after only three days back at work (as of writing this). Given how sleepy I am right now, I’m confident I’ll be able to get what I need this weekend, in terms of sleep and exercise. Sure, it would be great if I didn’t have the muscle cramping and joint stiffness side-effect of my medication, but I’m glad I was able to figure out exactly how its effecting me and that what I need to do to counteract it is work out more, not rest. Just gotta finish working through the rust and I’ll hopefully be able to push aside the work of the aches and pains. And don’t worry. I’m not just working through the pain. I messaged my doctor to make sure this was actually a viable solution and he said this was not only viable, but a really good mitigation for other potential side effects I might be seeing, so I should absolutely keep it up. It’s great it worked out like that.