Today I woke up feeling worse than yesterday. I started to feel sick almost a week ago, and even after taking care of myself the best I can with medicine and rest, I feel weaker each coming day. It’s not overwhelming, but it’s noticeable. This experience is not original. In the past if I catch something, it tends to get progressively worse until it gets better.
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Your immune system is a military force. When it detects an enemy, they deploy to the site to fight it. To help them get to the site, they expand the roads, often at the cost of surrounding structures. This is inflammation or swelling.
Many illnesses hide themselves in and among healthy cells. Therefore, in the first stages of the battle, your immune system will cause a lot of damage to healthy cells just to target the illnesses hiding among them.
Your immume system can also choose to roast the illness with fever or flood the region (runny nose). Both of these make you feel worse.
When they encounter more enemies, they call reinforcements, increasing the immune response and making you feel worse with time.
At the same time, the soldiers on the front line are gathering information about the enemy to special operatives in your immune system. These operatives develop an identifier (antibody) that can be spread on the battlefield to only stick to the enemies. Once this is done, the immune system can directly target enemies rather than harm healthy cells. At this stage, the illness gets quickly cleaned up and you rapidly feel better.
The immune system then remembers the enemy for some time (immunity) so further attacks from the same illness are rapidly defeated.
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