Sunday 13 March 2005

Pic of the day: Into the darkness. Yes, that's me. You haven't seen me on photo for a while, I know.

Another cold

You're supposed to run a fever when you're sick. Certainly if you are shivering for quite awhile in a normal warm room while wearing outdoors clothes that you use in the middle of the Norwegian winter. So imagine my confusion when I finally measure my temperature and find it to be perfectly normal.

On Saturday I had bought groceries as usual, but my appetite was uncharacteristically low. Then today around 10 o'clock my digestion started to act up. At first there were conflicting signals; it seems that I have been developing some degree of constipation without noticing. (I guess it's easy to forget going to the bathroom when you're playing Sims2 university...) Anyway, what followed was certainly no constipation. And then there was the shivering as if a deep cold had settled inside me. And finally the ugly sleepiness that faithfully follows these attacks. "Darkening" I call it, for it is not a comfortable tiredness like you may feel at the end of a day. It is a scary feeling that consciousness is slipping away from you when you really need it. Not like fainting, for your body still has the strength to obey you; but your brain has not.

The fear that I feel may be a conditioned reflex that goes with the shivering; after all, it works the other way around too. Or perhaps it is just a natural reaction to getting sick: Sickness is a threat to the body just as much as a knife is. (In developing countries diarrhea is a leading cause of death even today, and this surely was the case for our ancestors as well until recently. But let's not get all technical here.)

***

This is not the first such Darkening. I described pretty much the same symptoms in a diary in March 1999, so it is not likely to be some kind of cancer or degenerative disease. There seems to have been more of them over the last year or two, but perhaps that's just because they occur at work sometimes now. On the other hand, the last years have seen very few in the night. And this has got me thinking again. That, and another journal entry about a morning where I was shivering with cold in a warm room and then found my body temperature to be 2° below normal. Could it be that the panic attacks at night when I was younger, was actually the same thing? At the most extreme, perhaps they were never psychological in origin at all. Perhaps my brain was creating the panic in order to stave off hypothermia. Now that I look back at it, the symptoms were almost exactly the same. Almost? I can't point at one that was missing.

A food poisoning runs its course with no regards to your body temperature, though it may be accompanied by fever if toxins get your immune system to react. Running guts from too much coffe, chocolate or fiber also have their intensity and duration from whatever set them off. But with these attacks, raising body temperature seems to be the key to end them. Dressing in winter clothes and moving tirelessly moves me on to the next phase, the extreme drowsiness. I usually fall asleep in a chair these days, and wake up after anything from ten minutes to an hour. I have no idea where the sleep fit into the theory, though. If the idea was to raise body temperature, sleep is the last thing you'd wish. But perhaps the sleepiness is the brain's signal that enough is enough, don't overdo the excitement. Perhaps the discomfort of it is the mixed signals of accellerating and braking at the same time. I cannot offhand think of any case where the Darkening came before the cold, except when I slept at night.

But why would my hypothalamus let my temperature fall well below normal and then suddenly panic? Why wouldn't I just feel gradually more chilly until I dressed better? OK, while sleeping that may be hard. But not at work or while playing Sims2. I am not really that oblivious. And for that matter, how does the body maintain normal temperature when people sit still or even sleep? If I can do it 355 days of the year, why not always? I have no good answer to that. But I have the beginning of a theory. If I could find it out, it is possible that my whole view of myself might change.

Or I may be dead wrong. I don't mind being wrong actually, but I do mind being dead, so I would rather not overlook something important.