First day of kayak building on the floor was challenging. For anyone who is wondering about the point of this exercise, I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), which is an illness with a common and a medical definition. The common understanding is someone who is really tired all the time for no apparent reason. The medical definition now includes disruption of primary energy pathways, chronic inflammation of the brain, extensive small fiber neuropathy, and seven different circulatory system impairments.
The root cause of all this is still not fully understood, but the net effect is a devastating chronic illness that leaves most people, myself included, a shadow of who we were before we got sick. ME/CFS disability spans a spectrum from bedridden with a feeding tube, to poor sleep, fatigue, and mild cognitive issues. I fall somewhere in the middle of the curve. It’s roughly equivalent to the misery of having a bad flu, for 12 years.
My personal coping strategy is learning everything I can about the latest science and trying anything I can think of to make things better. Everything from solidly conventional approaches to way far out there alternative stuff.
This week I’m taking a hydraulic approach. According to scientists one of the biggest problems with the illness is just dismal blood flow to the brain. This happens from a combination of large vessel dilation, small vessel constriction, low blood volume, slow heartbeat, and reduced cardiac output. I’ve noticed over the years that I become severely sick if I have to stand up all day but feel a lot better if I’m working on my hands and knees. This might be because cardiac output increases by 3 L per minute in a prone position and skeletal movement helps pump blood.
So far I’ve resisted setting up my workshop this way for practical reasons, but this week seemed like the right time to finally run the experiment. All I can say for now is that working on the floor was slow and frustrating, but I’m gonna stick with it for as long as it takes to tell if it helps.
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