I just had Covid and I have no symptoms anymore except for being exhausted. Why is this? What actually keeps you tired during the recovery process?
In: Biology
Infections don’t just disappear overnight, even when the symptoms vanish. You’re still fighting the remnants of the disease, the stragglers that are too few in numbers to make you actively sick but are still too plentiful for your immune system to ignore.
Also, your immune system uses a lot of energy to function AND is deploying chemical weapons that risk damaging parts of your own body, so in addition to recovering from what the disease ate/killed, you have to spend more energy cleaning up your own self-inflicted harm. Every time you fight off a disease, you’re praying that your immune system kills the disease before either the disease or your own immune system kills you – the ultimate game of biological chicken.
And in case you were wondering, you do have *some* protection from your own immune system, but if you were perfectly defended against it, you’d instead have ALL the cancer because your cells would grow and mutate unchecked.
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If your body is a country, the disease is an invading army, and the immune response is a war, then the country needs time and resources to recover from the war
Felt the same after having the flu. Your body is still in recovery mode, rebuilding energy stores and cleaning up from the immune response. It just takes time to get back to normal. Rest up!
Your body has an energy battery called glycogen. You normally have a healthy amount of it stored for emergencies. Folks who regularly exercise have a larger store.
When you’re sick, you burn a lot, I mean a lot of energy to heat your body up and cause fever. Fever deters several microbes (especially fungi) and boosts your immune system.
You also produce a lot of immune cells to fight the infection. This also takes a lot of energy.
Finally, when the infection is fought off, your immune cells don’t die off immediately. They continue to course through your body and tend to try to fight off whatever they see. Your body is also in a state of high alert and have inflammation to aid fast movement of immune cells and that also causes you to get tired.
All this takes some time to get back to normal.
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