Today’s vocabulary word is “homeostasis”, which is the process by which the body maintains a certain equilibrium. It involves the endocrine system, the pituitary, the pancreas, all that fun stuff.
You may recognise these things as things that Do Not Work Well In Me.
It turns out that when you don’t produce your own cortisol, being given a sharp shock, for example by your cat jumping onto the balcony railing one floor up during her supervised balcony time, can precipitate an adrenal crash. Because your body will go “oh heck, you need some fight-or-flight stuff right now” and attempt to make some, and it is not good at this! So it tries really, really hard to give you some cortisol, and then everything falls apart and you end up lying naked in front of the fan in the middle of winter because your ability to regulate your body temperature is the first thing to go.
So, homeostasis. The ability to regulate your body temperature, the amount of oxygen in your blood, blood sugar and blood salt levels, electrolytes and pH, all of that stuff that you don’t really think about until it stops working. When your pituitary and pancreas stop working properly, as they do when you’ve got the stuff going on that I do, homeostasis becomes really, really difficult. And when homeostasis gets thrown off, so does every.hecking.thing else. Because when one thing goes awry, it sets everything else awry. Especially where blood sugars are concerned.
There is no point to this post really, except that I am exasperated at how much of a disaster my body is, that a scare from my cat can send me into an adrenal crash. As soon as we’d brought the cats inside, I was being urged to lie down and take some cortisol and I could feel my heart thundering. It was not a good time.
So in addition to being a medical snowflake, I am now a fainting goat.
The Medical Snowflake Diaries 