kontextmaschine:

It first struck all at once when I was in my bedroom at the end of the night, I struggled to bed, fell asleep, and was still so weak on waking my resting breath didn’t completely cycle the air in my lungs, so I manually took deep breaths.

That made me feel marginally better so I tried hyperventilating, that made me feel marginally better yet, enough to struggle to the kitchen.

I grabbed a few chunks of dried pineapple to eat and that made me even marginally better still, but I was still absolutely feeble.

I had a clever generalist’s understanding of things, though.

“Huh, more oxygen helps… more blood sugar helps… but even together they’re not enough. This sounds like an issue with aerobic energy generation.”

And I knew that creatine enables anaerobic energy generation from fat, which can be drawn on when energy demand exceeds aerobic capacity, and I had some on hand and I thought “may as well try”, so moving as if gravity was 3 times as strong I took a few scoops in a cup of water, shook it up, gulped down, a few minutes later I did in fact feel better so I did it again and I was back to normal.

And then I mad scientist laughed my ass off, I’m extremely proud of that one, made me feel like Batman reasoning his way out of the Riddler’s trap.

This was the new effect from my second case, which means my first hadn’t fully worn off and I had like 40% physical and 60% mental function max even before this.

The iron thing didn’t show up til my 6th case, at first I was just like “oh I underestimated the aerobic fatigue gotta take more creatine” but it got worse every day and felt different, specifically heavy in my blood, and I was like “uhh I guess this kinda reminds me of anemia? Let’s pick up some iron supplements” and THAT was it