The brain and the body

It's amazing how fast it took after finding out that my lung function has dropped to me feeling super tired and unwell in general. It's as though as soon as my body realized my lungs were crapping out, it just stopped trying.

I realize it is mostly psychological as one rarely goes from feeling ambitious and energetic in the morning, to having a killer headache and exhausted for the next two days. I mean, sure it happens, but seeing as it started to happen immediately after my clinic appointment, it's fairly clear that the appointment zapped all the energy out of me. I didn't even make it to pottery class last night.

However, just because my lack of energy yesterday and today is mostly psychological, doesn't make it any easier. There is now added anxiety of going to the hospital and if I'll have to go through the emergency department. I hope once I actually get into a room at the hospital, I'll feel a bit better. And perhaps, I truly am tired from my lack of sleeping-in this week and would have crashed out yesterday either way. I will never know.

It would be interesting to study the effects of being told your health is either improving or declining and see how you feel the next day. I would bet there is a good correlation between people believing that they're sick and immediately feeling ill. I would imagine it's been done at some point (a brief search turned up nothing for me) even though it would be really hard to get past a ethics committee. I can't imagine they would look kindly on researchers telling a bunch of healthy participants they had cancer just to study how ill the participants made themselves. Universities try to stay away from research that will get them sued.