I’m reading In His Image by Paul Brand and Philip Yancy (Zondervan, 1984). Dr. Brand is a surgeon and it is his thoughts that are recorded in this book, the companion to Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. Last night I read with fascination this description of blood and had to share it here:
“What does my blood do all day?” a five-year-old child asked, peering dubiously at his scraped knee. Whereas the ancients would have responded with elegant references to ethers and humours borne in that “pure clear lovely and amiable juice,” perhaps a technological metaphor would serve best today. Imagine an enormous tube snaking southward from Canada through the Amazon delta, plunging into the oceans only to surface at every inhabited island, shooting out eastward through every jungle, plain, and desert in Africa, forking near Egypt to join all of Europe and Russia as well as the entire Middle East and Asia – a pipelines so global and pervasive that it links every person worldwide. Inside that tube an endless plenitude of treasures floats along on rafts: mangoes, coconuts, asparagus, and produce from every continent; watches, calculators, and cameras; gems and minerals; forty-nine brands of cereals; all styles and sizes of clothing; the contents of entire shopping centers. Four billion people have access: at a moment of need or want, they simply reach into the tube and seize whatever product suits them. Somewhere far down the pipeline a replacement is manufactured and inserted.
Such a pipeline exists in each one of us, servicing not four billion but one hundred trillion cells in the human body. An endless supply of oxygen, amino acids, nitrogen, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sugars, lipids, cholesterols, and hormones surges past our cells, carried on blood rafts or suspended in the fluid. Each cell has special withdrawal privileges to gather the resources needed to fuel a tiny engine for its complex chemical reactions.
Okay, two more paragraphs on blood that amaze me. The first is amazing due to sheer numbers. The second relates to the truth of living with diabetes. I prick my fingers and test my blood sugar levels about 12 times daily… and every time I do this I’m surprised by how quickly the blood clots. For all the things wrong with my diabetic body, the clotting factors work beautifully! Our bodies are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made. Read on:
What the telescope does to nearby galaxies, the microscope does to a drop of blood: it unveils the staggering reality. A speck of blood the size of this letter “o” contains 5,000,000 red cells, 300,000 platelets and 7,000 white cells. The fluid is an ocean stocked with living matter. Red cells alone, if removed from a single person and laid side by side, would carpet an area of 3,500 square yards.
When a blood vessel is cut, the fluid that sustains life begins to leak away. In response, tiny platelets melt, like snowflakes, spinning out a gossamer web of fibrinogen. Red blood cells collect in this web, like autos crashing into each other when the road is blocked. Soon the tenuous wall of red cells thickens enough to staunch the flow of blood. Platelets have a very small margin of error. Any clot that extends itself beyond the vessel wall and threatens to obstruct the vessel itself will stop the flow of blood through the vessel and perhaps lead to a stroke or coronary thrombosis and possibly death. On the other hand, people whose blood has no ability to clot live short lives: even a tooth extraction may prove fatal. the body cannily gauges when a clot is large enough to stop the loss of blood but not so large as to impede the flow within the vessel itself.