Why I Ask When It Happens
The short answer
After hearing where it hurts, I usually ask when it is worse — morning or evening, before eating or after, lying down or sitting. Those answers hold what a test sheet does not.
Contents
Why I Ask When It Happens
After hearing where the trouble is, I usually ask this.
When in the day is it worse? On waking, in the afternoon, or when you lie down?
Does it change after you eat? Is it different on an empty stomach?
Is lying down different from sitting?
Does it follow the seasons? Do you know before the rains come?
Is the day after a bad night different?
People coming for the first time find these questions a little unexpected. I ought to be asking where it hurts, and instead I am asking about hours and postures and seasons.
There is a reason I ask this way.
A test looks at the body under standardised conditions. Usually in the morning, fasting, seated, in a quiet room. It has to be measured that way for yesterday's number to be comparable with today's, so the method is right. But the day we actually live is not those conditions. We eat, we lie down, we move between heat and cold, we go about short of sleep.
Sleep comes as the hands and feet grow warm. There are things that worsen at night. Lying down changes the breath. The body after a meal is a slightly different body. All of these are things that appear only when the conditions have changed. Measure under standard conditions and they disappear.
So it is not strange to be uncomfortable while the tests are normal. It is only that no measurement was taken under the condition in which you are uncomfortable.
Knowing when it happens narrows down what is caught up in it. Someone who knows the answer has already told me half of it, and if you do not know, that is an answer too — then I suggest writing it down for a few days.
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