Blood, Everywhere

Blood, Everywhere

    One would think this might be a post about a new horror film, perhaps a crazed and deranged escapee terrorizing a small town.  Blood has something of a bad name and image...a cut, an accident, a package of meat.  Often you can hear the negative terms or connotations...a bloody mess, a bloodbath, bad blood, menstration, vampires (many religions prohibit eating blood, asking members to rinse meat or slaughter an animal by cutting the throat but not the spine so that the brain can continue to pump the blood out of the animal's body).  But blood is life, a term you also hear as in life blood, or blood lines, or blood brothers.  And (if you're still reading), this was pointed out quite vividly in the series Anatomy for Beginners, the second episode dealing with our body's blood circulation.

    To begin, if you haven't watched the series, the contrast is striking.  This isn't Hollywood.  This is a series of hours-old bodies donated to science for educational purposes, and carefully and clinically dissected bit by bit to show how the body works, from movement to digestion, and from circulation to reproduction.  As one example, Gunther von Hagens (the controversial anatomist due to his popularity in "plasticizing" bodies to display, his Body Worlds shows making the rounds in museums throughout the world) exposes the rib cage to show a body's lungs; when he cuts the trachea and inserts an air hose into the part feeding the lungs, you can watch an actual set of lungs inflate and deflate, a beautiful wing-like structure that carefully expands and folds back onto itself.  Even among the anatomy students viewing the procedures (a medical doctor is by von Hagens side to more thoroughly describe how the body works, in the case of the lungs, how pleurisy and asthma and smoking all impede your lungs' function and why they do so), the graphic opening of a "fresh" body (before the blood has begun to coagulate) is difficult to watch...you'll know within minutes if this show is something you'll find fascinating or repulsive.  

    Back to the blood.  In one segment of the show, you'll view the complexity of our circulatory system, how the blood works, the size of the aortas and veins, the intricate web of vessels in the lungs vastly outdone by the web of vessels in the brain, how the blood reaches even the smallest points of our bodies (prick anywhere on your body and you'll wonder how blood made it to that distant point).  Blood is everywhere in us, the average 5+ million cells (red, white and platelets which aid clotting) delivering oxygen and nutrients and taking away carbon dioxide.  As the ancient Greeks observed (and summarized in Wikipedia): ...When blood is drawn in a glass container and left undisturbed for about an hour, four different layers can be seen.  A dark clot forms at the bottom (the "black bile").  Above the clot is a layer of red blood cells (the "blood").  Above this is a whitish layer of white blood cells (the "phlegm").  The top layer is clear yellow serum (the "yellow bile"). 

    Made primarily by the marrow in our bones, blood cells are amazing carriers of more than just oxygen, carrying everything from hormones (primarily produced in our endocrine glands) to proteins (liver) and have just about 120 days to complete their function before being removed by the spleen to make way for new blood cells.  Lose 20% of your blood and you might feel a bit uncomfortable (explaining why you can safely donate a certain percentage of your blood); lose 40% of your blood and you'll enter into shock.  Upset the delicate balance and function of your cells (willingly such as through smoking or introducing infection in some form) or unwillingly (say, genetically having hemophilia or sickle cell anemia) and a host of medical issues may arrive (leukemia or other cancers).  Deplete the blood of minerals or oxygen and other medical issues emerge, such as carbon monoxide poisoning (carbon monoxide or CO, even from that of cigarette smoke, binds to our blood cells 230 times quicker than oxygen, thus making it difficult to feel its onset, being odorless and tasteless).

    Watch television a bit?  You'll notice a plethora of detective shows dealing with forensics, the team often capturing a speck of dried blood and analyzing its components for DNA or other traces of background information.  Now a test called VirScan can apparently test a single drop of blood for viruses you have or even once had decades ago.  The results look promising for some, detecting some viruses such as HIV or Hepatitus C, but less so for chicken pox or viruses such as Enterovirus or Rinovirus.  Still, the $25 test (still not available commercially) mirrors the advances coming as companies such as Theranos (mentioned in an earlier post) which are recognizing the vast amount of current and stored data available in each tiny blood cell in our body (the VirScan tests for over 1000 viruses, says an interactive piece in Popular Science).

    The sight of blood can make some people faint; while for others (such as surgeons) blood remains a force to be maintained or controlled or stabilized.  Blood pressure, bloodlines, blood tests (a good map to read your blood results from your lab tests --if you've ever wondered what the heck albumin and BUN counts are-- is available here), they're all a part of us, every part of us.  We shouldn't fear blood, our blood, since it sustains us.  Whether you watch the anatomy series or not, explore a bit more of your body and its circulatory system, a massive network of capillaries and veins and arteries that keep you walking and talking and thinking, and all due to something essential to life, to our life... our life blood.