I’m always using myself as my own personal experiment. It’s hard not to if you’re at all interested in anatomy, physiology or biology in general.
So recently I’ve had a bit of a cold. It’s my second in about 2-3 weeks (like buses you don’t see one for ages and then two come along at once) and both came from Jack. Interestingly, he wasn’t affected much by either of them, other than becoming snotty and a bit tired. I was the same for the first, but this second has been horrible. I had an elevated temperature for about 4 days (which made interviewing prospective medical students rather interesting) and only yesterday started to feel a little more alive. I’d still much rather sit quietly than move around. The other cold quietly came and went in just a few days.
This second time, the cold hit at the end of a tough week, where I probably hadn’t been getting as much sleep as normal, the levels of stress were reasonably high and a fairly large amount of work was required of me. So I was run down. Although this in no way applies the method (n=1) it felt like an interesting observation at the time.
If you take part in endurance exercise or lift weights you do it all the time: you see your physique change, with fat deposition and muscle tone altering in only 6 weeks most of the time, your resting pulse rate drops, and you usually feel different, but that’s much harder to measure. Likewise the effects of stress have been interesting, and although I’m very comfortable with long term high levels of stress my body isn’t and has been irreversibly damaged (that’s a bit melodramatic, but seems to be true). Climbing hard has left me with a few very interesting injuries – not from falls but from either muscles getting stronger in strange places and unbalancing antagonists, or from various bits of connective tissue getting torn trying to hold finger tendons in place. Other sports have also developed funny injuries which physiotherapists have had to explain to me. All in all, I’m a very interesting experiment for myself. Much of the time it’s fun trying to fix these injuries, and follow the progress. Unfortunately my motivation is very low these days – I’ve probably gone too long without endorphins.
So next time you get a cut or a graze in your skin, take time out to watch it heal. If you think about the clotting mechanisms that start the whole process off, and then imagine those cells migrating across the wound to repair the skin and throw out collagen fibres to hold the whole thing together (scar), it all becomes very interesting. Take some digital photos, and make a montage from fresh wound to fresh new skin.
