Early this afternoon, I went to a neighborhood blood drive and donated some blood. After all, it's a good cause, and I'm healthy, right? Only problem is that my 6'2", 135 pound frame doesn't readily accept the loss of a unit of blood that happily.
Now you're all nodding your heads, assuming that I passed out after the donation. Fear not! I was perfectly fine... at least immediately thereafter.
But clearly my immediate compensation (increased fluid/solute intake, baroreceptor reflex, etc.) was only temporarily adequate. A few hours after the donation, poor wiggin wasn't feeling so hot, so I spent most of the day reading/drinking in bed.
You're waiting for me to get the point, I know. Anyways, as I went through the whole process - from the preparations to finishing up my initial recovery - I was thinking of the detailed changes occuring in my cardiovascular and endocrine physiology in response to the sudden blood loss. I had it all visualized (well, except for the parts where I got a head rush from standing up; I wasn't visualizing much of anything then), with the correct annotated equations/graphs/everything. Okay, so what's so special about this?
Sadly, this occurred without my conscious effort. Dr. Shoukas (my cardiovascular physiology instructor this year) is probably grinning somewhere.
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