Rhabdude

Over the summer of my freshman year I tried out a new tennis clinic. The tennis part of the clinic lasted for two and a half hours but there was a 30 minute fitness session after. The main fitness drill we did was doing crossfit style burpees where you basically just fall on your hands and break your fall with your arms. The drill was seeing how many of these burpees you could do in under 5 minutes. Competitive by nature, I completely maxed out and I had trouble bending my arms at the elbows when I went to get a drink of water. At that point, I knew I would be sore the next day but had no idea of the seriousness of my condition. The next morning I woke up to excruciating pain in my shoulders and especially my triceps. I still thought it was just regular soreness and decided to go to a different tennis clinic in the afternoon. Though still super sore, I played intense tennis for 3 and a half hours that day. The next morning I woke up and felt by far the worst soreness I have ever felt in my life. My triceps were on fire and hurt even with the smallest movements. I had trouble doing everyday activities such as brushing my teeth and eating. It almost felt as if my muscle was super short and was stretching beyond its limit if I tried to straighten out my arm. Still, I thought it was regular soreness because at that point I had no idea that Rhabdo even existed. It went on like this for days, I would struggle through the day thinking I was just sore and in time it would go away. However, after about 3 days I was still feeling super sore but had scheduled a tennis hitting session with a friend that I would feel bad about canceling last minute. I tried hitting and just pushed through all the pain. However, after hitting, my arms felt ten times worse and wouldn’t stop throbbing. At this point, my parents and I realized that this was definitely not normal. We started researching the web about what could possibly be happening to me and we eventually came across Rhabdo. As soon as we realized there was a slight possibility that I had developed Rhabdo, we rushed to the hospital to get an IV and my blood drawn. Still, the doctors thought it was extremely unlikely that I had gotten Rhabdo as it was a super rare condition for teens. After drawing my blood, I personally expected to receive normal levels and for the soreness to go away with more time. The levels that were being measured is called CK or creatine kinase. CK is just naturally in your muscles and normal levels are from 0 to 290 units per liter. However, when I got my levels back I was stunned to see that my CK levels were over 35,000. The doctors were super alarmed as they had never really seen anyone my age come down with Rhabdo so I immediately rushed to the hospital. I was hooked up to an IV right away and got my blood drawn again. At this point I knew that my condition was super serious but still only expected to be in the hospital for a couple days. However, my levels did not go down quickly enough and I had to wait until my levels reached 5,000 before I could leave the hospital. What I thought would only be a couple days turned into 5 nights. Throughout that time period I did everything I could to get better quickly so I drank as much water as I could. I was drinking more than one gallon of water a day and that combined with the IV led to me peeing every 20-30 minutes. I also got my blood drawn once every morning and every night. Though I was super demoralized and bedridden, I still did everything to help my tennis including visualization and listening to tennis audio.