After 5 days of fever...
The only medicine is to slow down, and be here now.
The human immune response to fevers has always fascinated me ever since I can remember studying it in Biology class at secondary school and later during my medical studies (nope, I never finished medical school). But here I am, recovering after five days of a fever, most days which were high and close to 40 degrees. And then, on Sunday, a low-grade, soft, muted yellow instead of the bright red of my digital thermometer. On days like these, while I am under my weighted blanket (after two weeks of intense and gruelling work travel) and allowing my body the space to heal, I am grateful for some knowledge of what is occurring at a cellular and biochemical level, as I didn’t need to prompt my body to respond - it simply did.
A fever is your body’s way of protecting you—a first line of defence against any bacteria or virus that it perceives as foreign to what the immune system recognises. I won’t delve into all the details of the various layers of immune response (it is quite fascinating, though), but I will mention that your body raises its temperature to enhance the inflammatory response, thereby supporting the many layers of the immune response. Simply put, your immune system functions better at slightly higher body temperatures. Thus, your body elevates its temperature in an effort to defend you—the human—against something it has detected that shouldn’t be there.
As we age, our body's ability to respond with a fever response decreases. For immunocompromised individuals, those with disabilities and other health issues, as well as people with comorbidities, their immune response is already weakened. This is why it is so critical to wear masks and take basic precautions in communal spaces, as we cannot know everyone’s capacity to withstand even the basic seasonal flu. When we consider every single contagious virus circulating at the moment, not wearing a mask and assuming everyone is healthy can become deadly.
Why am I sharing this?
I will forever be a nerd.
I miss teaching science (maybe I will return to it someday).
and science will always be my starting point for helping me understand the world.
Our bodies do not wait (unless we find ourselves in one of the categories mentioned above) to respond to something they perceive as harmful. They do not ask for our permission to take necessary action. Our bodies are biologically programmed to respond, and the cascade of events unfolds—millions of sequences, signals, hormonal responses, and much more—all occur without us needing to consciously say or do anything. Our bodies instinctively know how to protect and care for us.
However, living in violent realities and systems, surrounded by so much noise and due to our hyperfocus and general overwhelm, we forget our bodies' inherently healing nature. If we simply provide our bodies with space, rest, water, and nourishing food, we will generally be all right—much like any good houseplant, really.
“My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and the loudest thunder. And then there will be no room left inside of me for what has been except as memory of sweetness enhancing what can and is to be.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
My relationship with my body has changed significantly over the past four years. Divorce, health scares, depression, and a serious accident requiring hospitalisation and surgery, among other challenges, have all compelled me to rethink how I treat this place—my body—that I consider home. I realise in the past that I may not have fully answered that question at all. But these last four years, as I moved in and out of hospitals, I found myself thanking the universe for my still-functioning limbs after a severe fall and, in another instance, expressing gratitude to the doctors who worked with me to understand what was wrong when my body and I felt at odds with each other. I had to confront how I had treated my body in the past, all it has done to protect me through every stage of my life, and reflect on what it needs from me now. While rest is indeed revolutionary, it also provides us with a space to understand our bodies in a way these systems are determined to keep us from - and in this understanding lies the revolution.
Ancestor, Audre Lorde’s, “The Cancer Journals” has been a profound book for me in supporting this reexamination of my relationship with my body in its entirety (my silence, my voice, my writing, my mind, my thoughts… this book is so exceptionally good that if you haven’t yet read it, I encourage you to add it to your list). For me, the question of what my body needs now is a daily practice and commitment that I centre, and it often means I am continually curious and questioning myself about the why, the feelings, that twinge, the origins of things, what’s stored, what needs to be released, what I am holding that isn’t mine, what I can let go, what I am ready for, and what I am not ready for. I am becoming, slowly and patiently, my own auntie/grandmother self, laughing at myself as I fall in love with my body in different ways every day.
And it is with this same auntie/grandmother energy that the next thing on my to-do list is a nap under this weighted blanket because my body is still healing, and it’s my job to give it the space to do so.
Rest well, friends, and take care of yourself.
-Uma
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Thanks for reading, and feel free to share below how you observe your relationship with your body and what has helped cultivate this relationship for you.
Rest well Uma! Let your body work its magic to give you a full and robust recovery. May this resting spell be cast on everyone, especially those working hard to make big messes! :)