September is here and I see I have not blogged for two months. Much has happened. My right breast had a smile cut into it below the right nipple whilst various bits and pieces were extracted and I have been told to recuperate: "You won't feel right for several months, I had to do some restructuring," my consultant told me cheerfully when I went for the follow up - she has been excellent (and frank, Miss Franks even) in all her ways. That would account for the pain - mostly manageable but occasionally stabbing - a fleshly reminder of my composition. I am well and do not need to return, but my heart is with those frightened faces I saw in the waiting room and with my stepmum-in-law who is in the hospice: her breast did not give news to smile about. My own dear mother has not received good news about her health either. And so we pray and consider what we are made of.
If we believe that we are more than bodies, our bodies are temples that house the spirit and the soul: mind, will, emotions, personality. Should we not believe in the spirit, then perhaps the body takes on yet a deeper, perhaps even spiritual (to many) significance. To all, the body is a marvel and a wonder and in my view, a testament to a great and deeply profound creator. Yet the body remains a mystery, and we are slaves to it's mercurial moods and delicate balances. I read that there are as many neurons in the brain as there are stars in the Milky Way and that my intestines are a veritable motorway of (who knew?) functioning neurons, and I am boggled.
I am awestruck by the ability of the body to adapt and compensate for itself. A friend who has had two dreadful car accidents was describing to me how he could no longer use his ankle and so the bones of his foot had adapted as hinges instead. The has a remarkable ability to heal itself. Even if half of the organ is removed, it can grow back. Consider plasticity. Neurons can change their function based on information they receive via the senses from the outside world. In the case of deafness, for instance, neurons normally utilised for hearing can be diverted to the eyes, to helping deaf people to 'see' more.
Oliver Sacks died the day before yesterday and I have been reading some of his writing on the body - unparalleled work, in my limited experience, in that it is so literary and somehow transcendent - his writing on marijuana experimenting is at any rate! I have been as grateful, of late, as a weary Mormon pilgrim happening upon ephedrine containing roadside herb, for my prescribed narcotics. Solpadol has certainly taken the sharp edge off the blade these past few weeks, though I am mindful that this too must end and I shall rely on this amazing thing I dwell in to continue to heal itself - as the current dull ache I now feel reassures me somehow.
Today I am grateful to my body and my health. Oh and it's my eighth wedding anniversary. I am profoundly grateful for my husband and for the three little ones we now have in addition to my first born. We do not have ourselves, or each other, certainly not in these current forms, for long; but what a marvel it is, that we exist, that we, in some ways, like the liver, regenerate; and that we, like our creator, get to create in turn. What a fabulous event life is. And how precious.
