(Below is a piece I wrote for the Williamsburg Area Bicyclists newsleter.)

When Riding The Bike Is A Matter of Life and Death

I nearly died this past October.

Over the past several years, I had been bicycling a great deal. I rode more than 5,000 miles in 2004 and 2005, and had ridden more than 2,000 miles by October of last year. During that time, though, I had had a persistent cough. A chest x-ray in 2004 revealed nothing suspicious, so I was referred to one allergist and then another, both of whom, it turns out, treated me for ailments I did not have. The cough continued. In frustration, I went back to my family practice doctor late last summer, who ordered another chest x-ray. This one did reveal trouble spots on my lungs. I was referred to a pulmonologist, who performed a bronchoscopy (a thoroughly disagreeable procedure that allows the doctor to extract lung tissue for biopsy). From that biopsy, the disease appeared to be something called sarcoidosis, which is treated with prednisone. But I quickly began feeling terrible, with fever and chills, and when my blood oxygen level dropped below 80%, I was hospitalized in Williamsburg. Within a day, I fell into acute respiratory distress, and was transferred to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. There, respiratory therapists kept me alive on a ventilator for nearly a week while the infectious disease doctors worked to find out what was wrong with me.

Thank God, one doctor thought to do a test for a fungal infection called histoplasmosis. Bingo! The doctors disconnected the seven IV medications they had been giving me (they were considering that many possible diseases), and filled me with an awful but highly effective drug that attacks histoplasmosis, and my recovery began.

My case was so unusual it was presented in medical conference at the Eastern Virginia Medical School. Only weeks before I was hospitalized, I had ridden 77 miles in the Surry Century. How could someone in such good physical shape fall into respiratory crisis so quickly? One answer appears to be that steroids, such as prednisone, cause fungal infections to grow wildly out of control.

Because it was an unusual case, a number of doctors became interested. One was an internist who took over the traffic control of my treatment, who was himself a tri-athlete. He treated me as he would an athlete, and took his cues from the fact that I was making a surprisingly strong recovery following the correct diagnosis. He was aggressive in discharging me from the hospital after I had been there for a month. I thank God for that, too! I spent December and January at home, recovering, before returning to work. And when the temperatures started getting above 50 degrees, I started getting back out on my bike.

I’ve omitted a lot of details, to cut to the chase. (I haven’t even mentioned the tracheotomy and the feeding tube!) And, you may be asking, why is this piece even in a bicycling club newsletter? It’s because of this: one of my doctors told me that, if I hadn’t been in such good aerobic shape from bicycling, my heart and lungs would have failed during that first week, when I was on a ventilator. And, he said, my recovery was surprisingly strong because of that fitness I had taken into the hospitalization. So the moral of the story is: get out there and ride! It could indeed be a matter of life and death.

I’ve recently bought a new bicycle, to celebrate my recovery. In the past several years, though, I rode all those thousands of miles on the only Schwinn that I ever saw out on a club ride. And so, as the club’s resident Mr. Language Person, Bob Austin, said to me, “You were saved by the Schwinn!” Yes, that, and having some awfully good doctors in Norfolk.