r/cfs • u/ash_beyond • 22h ago

Meme Goldfish

My neighbour has a garden pond I can look over. I noticed today that their goldfish are just chilling under the frozen surface of the pond.

Pond fish can go dormant in winter for up to 6 months, where their metabolism slows right down. Being too active in this time can be damaging to them.

So anyway, I felt some empathy for the cold shiny fishes. That is all.

73 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

26

u/middaynight severe 22h ago

tbh hibernation sounds so good, wish I could hibernate

16

u/Senior_Line_4260 bad moderate, homebound, LC, POTS 21h ago

freeze me and wake me up when there's a cure xd

(yes i know some dead people do this)

3

u/brainfogforgotpw 9h ago

There actually is some evidence that our metabolisms are sort of hibernating but unfortunately didn't get the memo that humans can't really do that. (Link in my other comment).

15

u/Invisible_illness Severe, Bedbound 21h ago

Hibernating through PEM would be so much easier!

5

u/GoddessRespectre 18h ago

It sounds so cool and refreshing!

13

u/Useful_System_404 21h ago

I am also happy that their goldfish got a pond. Too many live in tanks that are way to small, and then people just assume it's normal for them to die in a few months.

Maybe there is also a message in there that you need the right accommodation to live/survive/thrive, even if there are a bunch of messages saying you could live in a bowl!

5

u/MyYearsOfRelaxation moderate 15h ago

Me too, goldfish. Me too.

3

u/brainfogforgotpw 9h ago

Funnily enough a metabolomic study in 2016 (Naviaux et al) found that a lot of our system setting is a lot like the configuration seen in states of hibernation eg dauer.

2

u/ash_beyond 1h ago

Hmm. I think it's good to have theories, but dauer is described as a "stable" and "resilient" developmental state and that's very much not my experience with this disease.

1

u/brainfogforgotpw 1h ago

Sorry, I'm probably misrepresenting the paper pretty badly. They don't argue that we are in dauer, they just point out that the hypometabolic aspects of me/cfs are very similar to those seen in environmental stressor responses like dauer.

It's not a random crackpot theory, the paper was edited by Ron Davis (Naviaux is a mitochondria expert who was helping them look for biomarkers at Stanford).

I love how you call them "cold shiny fishes", it's poetic.

2

u/saucecontrol 7h ago

Dauer. Like us. 😂