You Can't Get Something For Nothing

Since I’ve been both bored with my exercise routine and cash-strapped, my policy over the past few months has been not to pass up a free exercise trial.

Spinning at a new studio? Check. Thai boxing/yoga/kettlebell fusion? Check. (Wish I could afford that last one – it was awesome.) Last Thursday I got up before 6 am to be in the park for a free circuit training session. There seemed to be a crazy amount of bugs, and true to form I got a lot of bites. (When I was in Bali a couple of years ago with a friend, the joke was that I should be put outside the yoga studio as a mosquito offering and then nobody else would get bitten.)

These were midge bites – British for super-nasty flies. A few of them were bleeding –at one point one of the trainers pointed to the blood on my sock and asked me if I were OK – but I didn’t think it was a big deal.

Much of Thursday I felt slightly off. A bit sweaty, headache-y and tired, but hey, I figured tired was a natural reaction to barely six hours’ sleep. The skin on my legs and ankles felt a little tight – like a sausage about to burst – but I shrugged that off.

As the day wore on I found it more and more difficult to walk. At dinner at a friend’s, I looked down and saw that my feet literally were twice their normal size, and that my ankles had been replaced by cankles. The skin looked shiny and about to burst. I was having trouble catching my breath.

“You look gray,” said my usually preternaturally calm friend, sounding slightly panicked. It was 10 pm. He suggested calling NHS Direct. All I wanted was to lay down.

I’ll skip the boring bureaucracy bits and fast forward to 2:30 am, when the NHS doctor made a house call to give me antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory shot. (There’s been an awful lot of awful things written and said about the NHS, some of them probably by me, but I was awfully grateful that this particular service of the NHS allowed me to stay at home, nice and comfortable, instead of sitting in an emergency room half the night.) Lesson one: Bug spray isn’t just for the country. Lesson two: You can’t get something for nothing.

Not that I appear to have learned that second one -- I’m still tempted (name withstanding) to give these fit for a princess bootcamps a (free) trial…