we are all just stardust

 

One of the best things about being a physician is you get to live in a state of perpetual awe. It starts with the first pass of the scalpel on your first day in the anatomy lab. It continues as you tease out every organ, blood vessel, and nerve in the body you’ve been assigned to dissect. A sense of wonder takes your breath away the first time you hear a beating human heart. Suddenly it dawns on you that your own heart has been pumping steadily and predictably without any effort on your part since before the day you were born. You’d have to believe in miracles if you understood the way a broken body heals, what it takes for an open wound to close, how a lifeless heart can pick up the beat again. 

But that's just the beginning.

You would be flabberghasted if you understood the complexity and precision of a single cell cycle in your own body. How every cell knows when to pump out the chemicals it takes to defeat an infection, or battle depression, or laugh at a good joke. How it processes the energy it needs to survive, and how it knows when its time is up. How every cell in your body...the body you sometimes abuse and neglect, the one you sometimes detest, the one you overwork...is intimately connected with the entire universe. The majority of the atoms that are present in our bodies today have existed since the Big Bang...the moment the universe came into being.

"The amazing thing is that

every atom in your body

came from a star that exploded."

~Lawrence M. Krauss~

But that's not all. Each and every cell possesses its own DNA. A single strand of DNA is approximately 3 meters long, yet it fits into the nucleus of each cell, into a space of 2-3 cubic microns (1 micron=1 millionth of a meter). The DNA in your body, if unfolded and stretched out like a string, would wind around the Earth over 2 million times, or loop to the moon and back over 130,000 times, or stretch to the sun and back over 300 times. It is estimated that there are some 50 trillion (that's 50 million million) cells in the human body, all cooperating, all communicating, all contributing to the effort to keep you alive and well. And that's a lot of work.

"Be good to yourself.

If you don't take care of your body,

where will you live?"

~Kobi Yamada~

Your skin is entirely replaced every month. The lining of your stomach is replaced every four days. Your skeleton today is not the same one that held you up three months ago. The gaps between the neurons in your brain are bridged by an estimated 100 million million dendrites that make it possible to process an inestimable number of signals at lightning speed. To read this sentence, your brain arranges a precise pattern of millions of signals in just a few milliseconds, and then eliminates them instantly, never to be repeated again.

"We touch heaven

when we lay our hand on a human body."

~Novalis~

Shall I go on?

If we could see our bodies as they really are, we would never look at them the same way again. If we truly understood how the human body functions, and how it is connected to the universe, we would fall to our knees in praise and adoration. We would feed and care for it properly. We wouldn't overwork it, or poison it the way we sometimes do. We would look into the mirror, and see heaven and Earth reflected there.

"We are just stardust, after all."

~Jodi Lynn Anderson~

jan