Work and myoglobinuria

The baler

I haven’t been feeling the best as I have been suffering from a seasonal cold over the past week, so have been taking paracetamol to dry my cold up and to ease my aches.

It was a cold morning in Newtownabbey this morning and no longer had I started work this morning I got a call to load 6 cardboard bales onto the back of a lorry.

Theses bales weigh approximately somewhere in the region of a ¼ of a ton in weight and are brutes to move after they have been sitting outside in the damp air of winter. They soak up the dampness like a sponge making them more than they actually weigh when dry.

I had to get a two wheeled trolley to move them from the bay where they are kept to an area where they can be uploaded onto the lorry by the use of a forklift truck.

I might as well have been working on my own as my helper was just a shadow getting in my way.

One bale in particular became a problem because it had become swollen and had jammed itself between the baling machine and the railings that secure the baling bay. I hawked and pulled using the trolley to un-wedge   the jammed bale and only for the lorry driver coming to my aid did we get it finally free to load unto the back of the lorry.

During all this my muscles became very sore and weak and went into spasms and I was that bad that my muscles felt pumped up making me feel like the incredible hulk, because of the feeling of my muscles I knew that I would be suffering from myoglobinuria later in the day. My symptoms were flu like with the symptoms of hypoglycaemia all rolled in together, it wasn’t until after 9am and after I had breakfast of wheat-a-bix and semi-skimmed milk with tea and toast with a banana that I started to come round. It wasn’t until lunchtime that I started to urinate when I noticed that my urine was coke coloured. I knew what was happening early on so I started drinking plenty of water and I drunk about two litres of Evian still water.

At the time of writing this about 5:30pm UK time everything seems normal again other than my muscles feeling dull, compared to other myoglobinuria bouts that I’ve suffered this one is somewhere in the mid range of severity as my worst last for two days many years ago when I used to train with weights before I was diagnosed with McArdle’s disease.