The Sickness

"I PT’d fairly hard Friday afternoon. I lifted back and ran for 40 minutes. I felt good during PT, as I always do. That evening at dinner (my last meal for almost 3 days, as I would find out) I remarked to my boss that I still had that “post-PT feeling” even though I had been done for hours. The feeling I speak of is a slight rasp in your chest and lungs reminding you that they had been worked recently. It usually goes away after about two hours, put can persist most of the day if you pushed yourself to the limit, which I had not. I figured I had just worked harder than first thought, and everything was as normal. Here’s what I think was really going on. Be advised, I’m not a doctor, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Sometime earlier I had contracted a virus, either through food or contact with others. The PT, which coincided almost exactly with the end of the virus’s incubation period, lowered my immune system, creating what we call in the Marine Corps a “critical vulnerability” in my defenses. Like any good Marine Corps virus, it attacked my critical vulnerability with its “main effort,” the strongest part of its offense, and I crumbled."
Midnight in Iraq