White Blood Cells Quotes

And blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

For Jenn At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon and beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts. I fought with my knuckles white as stars, and left bruises the shape of Salem. There are things we know by heart, and things we don't. At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke. I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos, but I could never make dying beautiful. The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myself veins are kite strings you can only cut free. I suppose I love this life, in spite of my clenched fist. I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree, and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers, and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath the first time his fingers touched the keys the same way a soldier holds his breath the first time his finger clicks the trigger. We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe. But my lungs remember the day my mother took my hand and placed it on her belly and told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat. And I knew life would tremble like the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek, like a prayer on a dying man's lips, like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone… just take me just take me Sometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much, the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood. We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways, but you still have to call it a birthday. You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recess and hope she knows you can hit a baseball further than any boy in the whole third grade and I've been running for home through the windpipe of a man who sings while his hands playing washboard with a spoon on a street corner in New Orleans where every boarded up window is still painted with the words We're Coming Back like a promise to the ocean that we will always keep moving towards the music, the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain. Beauty, catch me on your tongue. Thunder, clap us open. The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks. Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert, then wake us washing the feet of pregnant women who climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun. I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun. I know the heartbeat of his mother. Don't cover your ears, Love. Don't cover your ears, Life. There is a boy writing poems in Central Park and as he writes he moves and his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart, and there are men playing chess in the December cold who can't tell if the breath rising from the board is their opponents or their own, and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subway swearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn, and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrun with strip malls and traffic and vendors and one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect. I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon. I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic. But every ocean has a shoreline and every shoreline has a tide that is constantly returning to wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones, to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave river that has to run through the center of our hearts to find its way home.

When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It’s inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera.

Leukemia is cancer of the white blood cells—cancer in one of its most explosive, violent incarnations. As one nurse on the wards often liked to remind her patients, with this disease “even a paper cut is an emergency.

I knew—but I did know that I had crossed 700  The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. I

ARIADNE: Why are they looking at me? COBB: Because you're changing things. My subconscious feels that someone else is creating the world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections converge on you. ARIADNE: Converge? COBB: They feel the foreign nature of the dreamer, and attack-like white blood cells fighting an infection. ARIADNE: They're going to attack us? COBB: Just you, actually.

I can't tell you how I knew - but I did know that I had crossed The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Through depression and many other dark low emotions, our Light dims and our immune system declines along with it. White blood cells are the physical Light of our body. Colors can be used to heal, restore and to uplift us.

White blood cells have several days of activity left in them after the heart stops beating. If the blood is sterile and in good condition, cadaver blood donation is perfectly fine.

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...

The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.

I love you more than words can say. I love you more than what you can imagine. I love you more than what your senses can perceive. I love you more than all the mortals’ feelings, emotions, love, and passion combined. You became part of my blood cells’ contents. You became my white blood cells that protect me from getting sick. You became my blood plasma that I will die without. You became my red blood cells that I can’t breathe without. You became my heart, that through it, I can survive. You became my lungs, that without them, I would die. You became my brain that is the only hope for life if my heart stops functioning. You became my eyes that see you and were created only to see you. You became my limbs that I can’t do anything without. You became my nose that smells your musk, even if you are amid millions of mortals. You became my lips that touch your flesh and paint their signature on every inch of your body. I am your love who cannot live without you.

Seawater is so similar in mineral content to human blood plasma that our white blood cells can survive and function in it for some time. I delight in my mental picture of this, the not-so-fanciful notion that we have seawater circulating in our veins.

Blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Henrietta was a black woman born of slavery and sharecropping who fled north for prosperity, only to have her cells used as tools by white scientists without her consent. It was a story of white selling black, of black cultures “contaminating” white ones with a single cell in an era when a person with “one drop” of black blood had only recently gained the legal right to marry a white person. It was also the story of cells from an uncredited black woman becoming one of the most important tools in medicine. This was big news.

In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit. They don't obey the rules. They are swarming into the bloodstream, overturning the quiet order of spleen and intestine. In the lymph nodes they are swelling with pride. It used to be their job to keep her body safe from enemies on the outside. They were her immunity, her certainty against infection. Now they are the enemies on the inside. The security forces have rebelled. Louise is the victim of a coup. Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can't I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on the portal vein? The inside of your body is innocent, nothing has taught it fear. Your artery canals trust their cargo, they don't check the shipments in the blood. You are full to overflowing but the keeper is asleep and there's murder going on inside. Who comes here? Let me hold up my lantern. It's only the blood; red cells carrying oxygen to the heart, thrombocytes making sure of proper clotting. The white cells, B and T types, just a few of them as always whistling as they go. The faithful body has made a mistake. This is no time to stamp the passports and look at the sky. Coming up behind are hundreds of them. Hundreds too many, armed to the teeth for a job that doesn't need doing. Not needed? With all that weaponry? Here they come, hurtling through the bloodstream trying to pick a fight. There's no-one to fight but you Louise. You're the foreign body now.

I’ve got it all figured out. Humans are cancer. If we were to look at earth from a distance, we would look like white blood cells, and watching our evolution would be like watching cancer spread.

count of white blood cells, or leukocytes. Manufactured in the bone marrow, these cells are the foundation of the body’s immune system and among the most reliable biological markers of the effects of ARS.

Complete Blood Count (blood test)—This test checks the health of your blood, including red and white blood cells. People with low blood count can feel anxious and tired, and they can have significant memory problems.

The level of violence finally forced the local paper to do what the local police would not: Talk to the victims. Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card, and cell phone stolen, and then the laughter. They just said “Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,” said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend.2

Our ability to extinguish new ideas is critical to productivity and to our capacity to scale existing projects. In a team setting, the skeptics—the ones who always question ideas first rather than falling in love with them—are the white blood cells.

Here's how it works. Your immune system protects you from all kinds of nasty bugs and helps repair tissue that has been damaged by injury or surgery. When a problem develops somewhere, your body does the equivalent of calling 911. The alarm sounds, and the immune system springs into action. The first responders, the white blood cells, travel to the site of the problem. As weapons, some of the cells released a shower of powerful free radicals (called an oxidative burst) that aids in the destruction of invading microorganisms and damaged tissue.

A few days after my microwave experiment, I was sitting in class and felt a gentle “pop” on my forehead and hot liquid ran down my face. It was the burn on my forehead just tenderly exploding, of its own volition, on my eleven-year-old face. As the pus—filled with healing white blood cells—trickled down my face, I thought, “I deserve this.

Daily alone time My ability to embrace stillness and meditation was the momentum swing in my health transformation. I breathed in and out with the musical sounds of the Pacific Ocean. I breathed in life, energy, and the universe and as I breathed out, I felt every red and white blood cell washing the cancer cells out to sea with the waves.

Boston. Fucking horrible. I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity." But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths. But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness. But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago. So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will.

Leukemia was a malignant proliferation of white cells in the blood. It was cancer in a molten, liquid form.

The study found that after two hours of intense cycling, the number of monocytes (another type of immune system white blood cell) in subjects’ bloodstreams took a dip. But those who were given the equivalent of about three-quarters of a teaspoon of nutritional yeast before they exercised ended up with even higher levels of monocytes than when they started working out.

There is way too much to explain – my own blood seeping into my sister’s veins; the nurses holding me down to stick me for white cells Kate might borrow; the doctor saying they didn’t get enough the first time around. The bruises and the deep bone ache after I gave up my marrow; the shots that sparked more stem cells in me, so that there’d be extra for my sister. The fact that I’m not sick, but I might as well be. The fact that the only reason I was born was as a harvest crop for Kate. The fact that even now, a major decision about me is being made, and no one’s bothered to ask the one person who most deserves it to speak her opinion. There’s way too much to explain, and so I do the best I can. ‘It’s not God. Just my parents,’ I say. ‘I want to sue them for the rights to my own body.

When my world gets reset to zero, my starting post is blood. Specifically, the elements of it, the working compounds that make it what it is. Red cells, white cells, DNA, plasma full of proteins, enzymes, antibodies, minerals, electrolytes—all the things that when poked and prodded right tell you just about everything you want to know about a person. Fascinating stuff, and a little freaky, when you think about it. Blood was where I returned to after the accident that smashed my knee. It was where I went when I got out of prison. It was where I was when Mercy fell into my lap. Now it seemed, blood was my whole reason for being.

took particular care with the delicate boundary between angry red clot and pearly white brain. Get too obsessive about removing every last smudge of congealed blood, and you risk losing another million brain cells.

The races I study still employ their immune systems, and the parallels between those systems and us as a race are striking. For we have become what Earthlings would call white blood cells. We remove foreign bodies from the cosmos. And every one leaves an imprint, a bauble of tech or a new idea, all of which we neatly coil into our lives, into our molecular structure. We are an immune system, and we are immune to death. This last, alas, is our curse.

They are not disease organisms bent on our destruction. They are something else entirely, the foundation of all life on this planet. As Margulis makes plain, “Bacteria are not really individuals so much as part of a single global superorganism.”13 And that superorganism is in actuality an incredibly large community of highly intelligent interactive subparts, just as our white blood cells are of us (or as we, as individuals, are of the human communities in which we live).

It seems wrong to call it "business". It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher–and none of us wavered in the belief that "stakes" didn't mean "money". For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for use business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It's a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living–and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great business do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the life of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is–you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping other to live more fully, and if that's business, all right, call me a businessman.

....One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody's here-- only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

You might have had the experience of looking at a clear blue sky on a sunny day and seeing little white sparks popping in and out of existence, like the briefest of shooting stars. What you are seeing, amazingly enough, is your own white blood cells, moving through a capillary in front of the retina. Because white blood cells are big (compared with red blood cells), they sometimes get stuck briefly in the narrow capillaries, and that is what you are seeing. The technical name for these disturbances is Scheerer’s blue field entoptic phenomena

If tissue samples--including blood cells--became patients' property, researchers taking them without consent and property rights up front would risk being charged with theft. The press ran story after story quoting lawyers and scientists saying that a victory for Moore would "create chaos for researcher" and [sound] the death knell to the university physician-scientist." They called it "a threat to the sharing of tissue for research purposes," and worried that patients would block the progress of science by holding out for excessive profits, even with cells that aren't worth, millions like Moore's.

being a true clone, the aphids are no more ‘social’ than the cells of your body. There is a single animal feeding on the plant. It just happens to have its body divided up into physically separate aphids, some of which play a specialized defensive role just like white blood corpuscles in the human body.

The word chimeric comes from Greek mythology, in which a chimera was a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a snake. CAR T-cells are called “chimeric” because they begin with ordinary T-cells taken from a person’s blood (the so-called “killer” white blood cells that recognize and attack a broad range of bacteria or viruses) and attach a kind of lion’s head: a molecular signal that guides the T-cells to seek and destroy cancer. The T-cell part of the chimera is a powerful killer, and the antibody at the head makes the attack more specific, reducing side effects.

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room America remained her warden.

I must’ve gone out for dinner with Al and Bernice, and I must’ve been full of reassurance and interstitial data. All the blood work was normal so far, but I don’t recall if an actual T-cell test was taken, or if we knew the results before the verdict. The T cells are a subset of the white blood count. Infection with the

The patient would prick her finger to draw a small sample of blood and place it in a cartridge that looked like a thick credit card. The cartridge would slot into a bigger machine called a reader. Pumps inside the reader would push the blood through tiny channels in the cartridge and into little wells coated with proteins known as antibodies. On its way to the wells, a filter would separate the blood’s solid elements, its red and white blood cells, from the plasma and let only the plasma through. When the plasma came into contact with the antibodies, a chemical reaction would produce a signal that would be “read” by the reader and translated into a result.

Normally, your brain edits out any interference, but it doesn’t always succeed. You might have had the experience of looking at a clear blue sky on a sunny day and seeing little white sparks popping in and out of existence, like the briefest of shooting stars. What you are seeing, amazingly enough, is your own white blood cells, moving through a capillary in front of the retina. Because white blood cells are big (compared with red blood cells), they sometimes get stuck briefly in the narrow capillaries, and that is what you are seeing. The technical name for these disturbances is Scheerer’s blue field entoptic phenomena (named for a German ophthalmologist of the early twentieth century, Richard Scheerer), though they are more commonly and poetically known as blue sky sprites.

...turned into a horrific mistake. Lucy Willis had observed that folic acid, if administered to nutrient-deprived patients, could restore the normal genesis of blood. Farber wondered whether administering folic acid to children with leukemia might also restore normalcy to their blood. Following that tenuous trail, he obtained some synthetic folic acid, recruited a cohort of leukemic children, and started injecting folic acid into them. In the months that passed, Farber found that folic acid, far from stopping the progression of leukemia, actually accelerated it. In one patient, the white cell count nearly doubled. In another, the leukemia cells exploded into the bloodstream and sent fingerlings of malignant cells to infiltrate the skin. Farber stopped the experiment in a hurry.

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me. THERE

That was Sea Island cotton the slaver had ordered for his rows, but scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden.

Chemotherapy drugs are blunt instruments. Some are more precisely targeted than others, but many simply interrupt cell division in general. The reason that this selectively kills cancer cells, instead of harming the patient and the cancer equally, is that cancer cells are dividing all the time, whereas most normal cells divide only occasionally. Some human cells do divide constantly. The most rapidly dividing cells are found in the bone marrow, the factory that produces blood. Bone marrow is also central to the human immune system. Without it, we lose the ability to produce white blood cells, and our immune system collapses. Chemotherapy causes damage to the immune system, which makes cancer patients vulnerable to stray infections.​[​5​]​ There are other types of rapidly dividing cells in the body. Our hair follicles and stomach lining also divide constantly, which is why chemotherapy can cause hair loss and nausea.

Mr. Alexander," I say, "my sister has leukemia." "I'm sorry to hear that. But even if I were willing to litigate against God again, which I'm not, you can't bring a lawsuit on someone else's behalf." There is way too much to explain--my own blood seeping into my sister's veins; the nurses holding me down to stick me for white cells Kate might borrow; the doctor saying they didn't get enough the first time around. The bruises and the deep bone ache after I gave up my marrow; the shots that sparked more stem cells in me, so that there'd be extra for my sister. The fact that I'm not sick, but I might as well be. The fact that the only reason I was born was as a harvest crop for Kate. The fact that even now, a major decision about me is being made, and no one's bothered to ask the one person who most deserves it to speak her opinion. There's way too much to explain, and so I do the best I can. "It's not God. Just my parents," I say. "I want to sue them for the rights to my own body.

Because nobody brought that up to you?” “No, we had no idea that there were any problems that would suggest that.” Besides, as she pointed out later in her testimony, she was not an expert on poison. Dr. Henry testified that Peru was not mentioned in papers on tropical sprue, and that even where the disease was common, those who contracted it had lived in the area for a long time, at least a year. Typhoid fever didn’t fit either. “Even though it’s an acute infection, [it] does not cause a tremendous elevation of the white blood cell count.” Dr. Henry believed that Mike had been septic more than once during his three hospitalizations. Dr. Pam McCoy, the ER physician at the UK Medical Center, testified next. “I work with residents and medical students. I teach them how to work in an emergency department. And usually . . . I go see patients, they go see patients with me; we talk about how you see a patient in the emergency department, how you take care of people, how you put in stitches, that sort of thing.

As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away.

As their white blood cell counts collapsed, infection crawled across the skin of the young operators and firemen: Thick black blisters of herpes simplex encrusted their lips and the inside of their mouths. Candida rendered their gums red and lacy, and the skin peeled back, leaving them the color of raw meat. Painful ulcers developed on their arms, legs, and torsos, where they had been burned by beta particles. Unlike thermal burns caused by heat alone, which heal slowly over time, radiation burns grow gradually worse—so their external beta burns expanded outward in waves from wherever radioactive material had touched them and ate into the tissue below. The men’s body hair and eyebrows fell out, and their skin darkened—first red, then purple, before finally it became a papery brown-black and curled away in sheets. Inside their bodies, the gamma radiation ate away the lining of their intestines and corroded their lungs. Anatoly Kurguz, who had fought to close the airlock door to the reactor hall in the moments after the explosion and was enveloped in steam and dust, had so much cesium inside his body that he became a dangerous source of radiation. He

Chemotherapy, the third main prong in cancer treatment after surgery and radiation, came about by similarly unlikely means. Although chemical weapons had been outlawed by international treaty after World War I, several nations still produced them, if only as a precaution in the event that others did likewise. The United States was among the transgressors. For obvious reasons, this was kept secret, but in 1943 a U.S. Navy supply ship, the SS John Harvey, carrying mustard gas bombs as part of its cargo, was caught in a German bombing raid on the Italian port of Bari. The Harvey was blown up, releasing a cloud of mustard gas over a wide area, killing an unknown number of people. Realizing that this was an excellent, if accidental, test of the mustard gas’s efficacy as a killing agent, the navy dispatched a chemical expert, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Francis Alexander, to study the effects of the mustard gas on the ship’s crew and others nearby. Luckily for posterity, Alexander was an astute and diligent investigator, for he noticed something that might have been overlooked: mustard gas dramatically slowed the creation of white blood cells in those exposed to it. From this, it was realized that some derivative of mustard gas might be useful in treating some cancers. Thus was born chemotherapy.

respiratory system encompasses the nose, throat, and lungs. Some of the oils that help the respiratory system include eucalyptus, myrrh, fennel, sandalwood, thyme, cypress, bergamot, and sage. · The digestive system is responsible for breaking down food and includes the stomach, liver, intestines, and gallbladder. Oils used for this include dandelion, marshmallow, meadow sweet, and chamomile. · The circulatory system is responsible for transporting blood and oxygen throughout the body. Oils used for this include lemon, lavender, peppermint, fennel, thyme, juniper, and white birch.  · The endocrine system includes the thyroid glands, the pancreas, and the hormone glands. Essential oils used are sweet marjoram, clary sage, fennel, jasmine, rose, lemon, and juniper. · The immune system is responsible for fighting against diseases including everything from a cold to malaria.   ·  The nervous system transmits nerve impulses throughout the body. These cells are vitally important to the function of the human body. Oils used for the nervous system include clove, basil, ylang ylang, lavender, chamomile, bergamot, and sweet marjoram. · The brain is responsible for the functions of almost every organ system throughout the body. The essential oils used for the brain include lavender, chamomile, basil, lemon, peppermint, and ginger.

Moon. Big white moon. White as milk moon. You’re all I can see from my window, here in the dark. Your light falls silver and white across the walls of my cell. The night-tide surges strong in me. So strong I can feel the grip of their drugs loosen. They fancy themselves high priests. Their gods have names like Thorazine and Lithium and Shock Therapy. But their gods are new and weak and cannot hope to contain me much longer. For I am the handiwork of far more powerful, far more ancient deities. Very soon my blood will learn the secret of the inhibiting factors the white-coated shamans pump into my veins. And then things will be very different, my beautiful moon. My white big moon. White as milk moon. Red as blood

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows . . . How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. "Everyone knows" is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens—think of the numbers for Tanglewood alone just between now and the year 4000. Then multiply that times everything. The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day, a perfect day lacking nothing in a Massachusetts vacation spot that is itself as harmless and pretty as any on earth.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.

Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth. Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie. Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying “Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,” and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, “you’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.” Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been to New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from a Jennifer Aniston cosmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin. Because I’m worth it.

Just as calories differ according to how they affect the body, so too do carbohydrates. All carbohydrates break down into sugar, but the rate at which this occurs in the digestive tract varies tremendously from food to food. This difference forms the basis for the glycemic index (GI). The GI ranks carbohydrate-containing foods according to how they affect blood glucose, from 0 (no affect at all) to 100 (equal to glucose). Gram for gram, most starchy foods raise blood glucose to very high levels and therefore have high GI values. In fact, highly processed grain products – like white bread, white rice, and prepared breakfast cereals – and the modern white potato digest so quickly that their GI ratings are even greater than table sugar (sucrose). So for breakfast, you could have a bowl of cornflakes with no added sugar, or a bowl of sugar with no added cornflakes. They would taste different but, below the neck, act more or less the same. A related concept is the glycemic load (GL), which accounts for the different carbohydrate content of foods typically consumed. Watermelon has a high GI, but relatively little carbohydrate in a standard serving, producing a moderate GL. In contrast, white potato has a high GI and lots of carbohydrate in a serving, producing a high GL. If this sounds a bit complicated, think of GI as describing how foods rank in a laboratory setting, whereas GL as applying more directly to a real-life setting. Research has shown that the GL reliably predicts, to within about 90 percent, how blood glucose will change after an actual meal – much better than simply counting carbohydrates as people with diabetes have been taught to do.

I couldn't read, and it had almost killed me. I hadn't even won properly. I sank to my knees, letting the platform carry me, and covered my face in my shaking hands. Tears burned just before pain seared through my left arm. I would never beat the third task. I would never free Tamlin, or his people. The pain shot through my bones again, and through my increasing hysteria, I heard words inside my head that stopped me short. Don't let her see you cry. Put your hands at your sides and stand up. I couldn't. I couldn't move. Stand. Don't give her the satisfaction of seeing you break. My knees and spine, not entirely of my own will, forced me upright, and when the ground at last stopped moving, I looked at Amarantha with tearless eyes. Good, Rhysand told me. Stare her down. No tears- wait until you're back in your cell. Amarantha's face was drawn and white, her black eyes like onyx as she beheld me. I had won, but I should be dead. I should be squashed, my blood oozing everywhere. Count to ten. Don't look at Tamlin. Just stare at her. I obeyed. It was the only thing that kept me from giving in to the sobs trapped within my chest, thundering to get out. I willed myself to meet Amarantha's gaze. It was cold and vast and full of ancient malice, but I held it. I counted to ten. Good girl. Now walk away. Turn on your heel- good. Walk toward the door. Keep your chin high. Let the crowd part. One step after another. I listened to him, let him keep me tethered to sanity as I was escorted back to my cell by the guards-who still kept their distance. Rhysand's words echoed through my mind, holding me together. But when my cell door closed, he went silent, and I dropped to the floor and wept.

In silence Peter and I make our way back to my room. We turn left, and a group of people stands at the other end of the hallway. It is the longest of the corridors we will travel through, but that distance shrinks when I see him. Held at either arm by a Dauntless traitor, a gun aimed at the back of his skull. Tobias, blood trailing down the side of his face and marking his white shirt with red; Tobias, fellow Divergent, standing in the mouth of this furnace in which I will burn. Peter’s hands clamp around my shoulders, holding me in place. “Tobias,” I say, and it sounds like a gasp. The Dauntless traitor with the gun presses Tobias toward me. Peter tries to push me forward too, but my feet remain planted. I came here so that no one else would die. I came here to protect as many people as I could. And I care more about Tobias’s safety than anyone else’s. So why am I here, if he’s here? What’s the point? “What did you do?” I mumble. He is just a few feet away from me now, but not close enough to hear me. As he passes me he stretches out his hand. He wraps it around my palm and squeezes. Squeezes, then lets go. His eyes are bloodshot; he is pale. “What did you do?” This time the question tears from my throat like a growl. I throw myself toward him, struggling against Peter’s grip, though his hands chafe. “What did you do?” I scream. “You die, I die too.” Tobias looks over his shoulder at me. “I asked you not to do this. You made your decision. These are the repercussions.” He disappears around the corner. The last I see of him and the Dauntless traitors leading him is the gleam of the gun barrel and blood on the back of his earlobe from an injury I didn’t see before. All the life goes out of me as soon as he’s gone. I stop struggling and let Peter’s hands push me toward my cell.

It seems wrong to call it “business.” It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher—and none of us wavered in the belief that “stakes” didn’t mean “money.” For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.

White, cremini, portobello, oyster, maitake, and reishi mushrooms have all been shown to have anticancer effects: they prevent DNA damage, slow cancer cell or tumor growth, cause programmed cancer cell death, and/or prevent tumors from acquiring a blood supply. These effects have been shown in breast, prostate, and colon cancers and/or cancer cells.18

Joseph shook his head. How could such a thing happen? It made him think of William Blake’s poem where a worm finds its way into a bed of luminous, red roses—O world thou art sick. He tried to divert himself by focusing on the drive. People were lining up to get tested. He watched them offer their arms to the technician; the dark-red fluid flowing from syringes into glass vials; the vials placed into plastic crates; the crates stacked one on top of another. The blood would be screened in a laboratory for the specific genetic markers on white blood cells and then compared to Emily’s. Hopefully, a match would be found.

it may cause. Useful as they are to a virus, though, the spikes also represent points of vulnerability. They are the primary targets of immune response by an infected host. Antibodies, produced by white blood cells, are molecules that glom onto the spikes and prevent a virion from grabbing a cell.

Resting his elbows on a wooden rail, he eagerly breathed in the cool, salty air. It took a few minutes for Fra Armando to notice how odd the southward rushing waters looked. The twilight-colored river had turned to blood. The Friar followed the dizzying rush of lenticular red cells, the size of loaves of bread, the amoeba-like gliding of the white cells, transparent enough to show their darkened nuclei, the snaking spiral worms that must have been malaria germs, the unusual fluorescence of lymph, the currents of glucose and protein. Fascinated and deathly tired, the Friar suddenly sensed that everything was alive, that everything lives, and that the universe does not at all operate like clockwork. Instead, it is a malleable architecture like the human body, a temple of skin, a basilica of scratches, a cenotaph of snot, with no right angles or durable materials, where the person creates his dreams, thoughts, and illusions, his time and his language like a cell secretes a hair or the crystal horn of a nail. And still, the least important cell in the universal body receives, through angel hormones and neural visions, the imperious commandments of God.

I spend most of my Mondays with blood. I am a hematologist by training. I study blood and treat blood diseases, including cancers and precancers of white blood cells. On Monday, I arrive much earlier than my patients, when the morning light is still aslant across the black slate of the lab benches. I close the shutters and peer through the microscope at blood smears. A droplet of blood has been spread across a glass slide, to make a film of single cells, each stained with special dyes. The slides are like previews of books, or movie trailers. The cells will begin to reveal the stories of the patients even before I see them in person. I sit by the microscope in the darkened room, a notepad by my side, and whisper to myself as I go through the slides. It’s an old habit; a passerby might well consider me unhinged. Each time I examine a slide, I mumble out the method that my hematology professor in medical school, a tall man with a perpetually leaking pen in his pocket, taught me: “Divide the main cellular components of blood. Red cell. White cell. Platelet. Examine each cell type separately. Write what you observe about each type. Move methodically. Number, color, morphology, shape, size.” It is, by far, the favorite time of my day at work. Number, color, morphology, shape, size. I move methodically. I love looking at cells, in the way that a gardener loves looking at plants—not just the whole but also the parts within the parts: the leaves, the fronds, the precise smell of loam around a fern, the way the woodpecker has bored into the high branches of a tree. Blood speaks to me—but only if I pay attention.

If Memphis were alive, gangs would be both her red and white blood cells—killing and healing and repeating.

It seems wrong to call it "business." It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner. business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher — and none of us wavered in the belief that "stakes'' didn't mean "money." For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living- and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is — you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.

The pace of cell renewal varies by body part. Your taste buds live only a few hours. Your white blood cells live about ten days. Your muscle cells live about three months. Even your bones are made anew time and again. Considering these differences, scientists have suggested that you replace about 1 percent of your cells each day.[1] That’s 1 percent today, another 1 percent tomorrow, amounting to roughly 30 percent by next month, and 100 percent by next season. Seeing yourself and your cells in this way, every three months you get a whole new you. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it takes around three months to learn a new habit or make a lifestyle change.[2] Perhaps we can’t teach an old cell new tricks. Perhaps our best hope lies in teaching our new cells.

SIGNALS THAT BABY IS OVERSTIMULATED As we watched babies playing with their parents, we witnessed how babies say to their parents, “Give me a break for a minute or two!” Here are the signals they give when they need to self-soothe. • LOOKING AWAY. This signal can be very clear, with the baby turning her head away, or it can be simply looking from our face to our less-stimulating shirt. • SHIELDING FACE WITH HANDS. Babies will put their hands in front of their face and look like they are trying to shield themselves. • PUSHING AWAY. When the baby is more coordinated, he may push a toy or other object away to show that he doesn’t want to play with it. • CLEARLY WRINKLED FOREHEAD. When the medial (middle, above the nose) portion of a baby’s forehead is bunched up (that is as much wrinkling as is possible with all the baby fat in the face), it means she is getting upset, often because she is overstimulated. The forehead makes the baby look like she is sad, or angry. However, when the baby’s forehead gets only slightly wrinkled, as though there is a butterfly on her forehead, this is usually not a negative sign and means she is concentrating. • ARCHING THE BACK. One sign that a baby is upset is that she arches her back and tenses her body. • FUSSING. The baby’s voice starts what seems like the beginning of crying and protesting. • SHOWING A MIXTURE OF EMOTION, such as the baby’s expression going back and forth between joy and fear. • CRYING. There are levels of upset in the crying of babies. The baby may eventually build up to a cry in which there is about a second of “winding up” intake of breath. Then the baby really hauls off and lets out a cry that is loud, shrill, and painful to hear. This is called a Valsalva cry. In a Valsalva cry, the lungs are working against a resistance, like when we blow up a stiff balloon, or lift a heavy weight. It is very stressful for the baby. For example, the baby’s blood pressure will increase, and the number of white blood cells in the baby’s blood will increase. WHAT

He peered through the microscope until the blood cells materialized, red and blue and shades in between, different shapes and sizes… In all these years, it never failed to amaze him, this magnificent dappled sea of bone marrow, ever regenerating and replenishing itself in an ongoing cycle that made life possible – red cells that carried oxygen, white cells that fought off infection, and platelets that made the blood clot.

Bone broth, however, can break up mucus and phlegm, and beyond alleviating congestion, it will support your immune system by boosting production of white blood cells and aid in relining the gut microvilli. Bone broth also provides support for anxiety and reduced cravings. Pretty cool for a mug of broth!

Mystery men with strange persuasive powers, sometimes good but more often evil, are described and discussed in many books with no UFO or religious orientation. A dark gentleman in a cloak and hood is supposed to have handed Thomas Jefferson the design for the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States (you will find this on a dollar bill). Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and many others are supposed to have had enigmatic meetings with these odd personages. These stories turn up in such unexpected places as Madame Du Barry’s memoirs. She claimed repeated encounters with a strange young man who would approach her suddenly on the street and give her startling prophecies about herself. He pointedly told her that the last time she would see him would serve as an omen for a sudden reversal of her fortunes. Sure enough, on April 27, 1774, as she and her ailing lover, King Louis XV, were heading for the palace of Versailles, the youthful mystery man appeared one final time. “I mechanically directed my eyes toward the iron gate leading to the garden,” she wrote. “I felt my face drained of blood as a cry of horror escaped my lips. For, leaning against the gate was that singular being.” The coach was halted, and three men searched the area thoroughly but could find no trace of him. He had vanished into thin air. Soon afterward Madame Du Barry’s illustrious career in the royal courts ended, and she went into exile. Malcolm X, the late leader of a black militant group, reported a classic experience with a paraphysical “man in black” in his autobiography. He was serving a prison sentence at the time, and the entity materialized in his prison cell: "As I lay on my bed, I suddenly became aware of a man sitting beside me in my chair. He had on a dark suit, I remember. I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn’t black, and he wasn’t white. He was light-brown-skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair. I looked right into his face. I didn’t get frightened. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I couldn’t move, I didn’t speak, and he didn’t. I couldn’t place him racially—other than I knew he was a non-European. I had no idea whatsoever who he was. He just sat there. Then, as suddenly as he had come, he was gone.

underground rivers, where the currents of blood follow ever-smaller branches of arteries until they pass back around into the veins, joining up to larger veins until they reach the surging heart. Red blood cells bounced and rolled along, squeezing through capillaries and then rebounding to their original puck shapes. White blood cells used their lobes to crawl into the vessels through lymphatic ducts, like doorways disguised as bookshelves in a house. And among them traveled the trypanosomes. I have looked at trypanosomes

When our white blood cells encounter a spreading virus, our bodies are told to amp up the heat to a temperature we can withstand but the virus can’t. Our response? Take medicine to remove the fever, keeping our body temperature in a nice range for the virus. Or

But suppose this man defends himself by claiming that he never chose to have a child, and certainly never chose to give up 30 percent of his salary for the next two decades to a woman he barely knows. (In New York this could easily end up being several million dollars.) Would such a defense be enough to get him off the hook? Of course not. His choice to have sex brought with it the natural obligation to aid any children that might result, even if having such obligations was the last thing on his mind when he was pursuing the hookup. This insight highlights a major difference between the violinist case and pregnancy. One does not have a natural obligation to the violinist; but a parent does have a natural obligation to his or her child — even if the woman never intended to bring about the child.29 We do not freely choose our natural obligations (and rights) as parents with respect to our children, just as the rights (and obligations) of our children with respect to us have nothing to do with their choice. Far from a parasite, the fetus is actually welcomed by a healthy female body, which has been created (by God and/or natural selection, depending on your point of view) with the specific capacity to protect, nurture, and sustain a prenatal child. As I have observed above, the mother’s pregnant body even makes special changes to protect the fetus from white blood cells attacking the fetus as foreign tissue. Both

By enlisting the assistance of a team of neuroimmunologists, however, Schaller succeeded in conducting one of the few studies to address the question. As in many of his previous trials, subjects were shown a disease-y slide show, but with one major difference: Immediately before and after the presentation, their blood was drawn and mixed in a test tube with a pathogen surface marker to determine how aggressively their white blood cells countered the challenger. Specifically, the investigators looked to see if arousing subjects’ disgust spurred their white blood cells to produce higher amounts of a pathogen-fighting substance called interleukin 6 (IL-6). It did—and by a whopping 24 percent.

History: *The owner noticed a soft, oozing mass on the head. *Mr. Snooze has been fighting with another cat recently. Assessment: *Mr. Snooze has a low grade fever. *There is an abscess on his head. An abscess is a pocket of pus that forms near an old bite or scratch wound. It is a collection of bacteria, white blood cells, and red blood cells. In other words, an abscess is an infected area under the skin. This abscess is draining. Treatment Plan: *If the abscess was not already draining, the doctor would have to sedate the cat and then surgically get the abscess to drain. If an abscess does not drain, it will be difficult to treat even with a medication. *Mr. Snooze is sent home with an oral antibiotic. This will help the cat fight off the bacteria that are causing the infection. *The owner is instructed to “hot pack” the wound multiple times a day. The

money.” For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.

Another option for athletes who want to sustain their immune function is nutritional yeast. A 2013 study reported that you may more effectively maintain your levels of white blood cells after exercise by consuming a special type of fibre found in baker’s, brewer’s, and nutritional yeast.67 Brewer’s yeast is bitter, but nutritional yeast has a pleasant, cheese-like flavor. It tastes particularly good on popcorn. The study found that after two hours of intense cycling, the number of monocytes (another type of immune system white blood cell) in subjects’ bloodstreams took a dip. But those who were given the equivalent of about three-quarters of a teaspoon of nutritional yeast before they exercised ended up with even higher levels of monocytes than when they started working out.68

One consistent feature stood out: The samples all displayed a striking depletion of white blood cells within the lymph nodes and bone marrow, precisely the tissues that become packed with the feverishly dividing cells of lymphoma patients. Two Yale pharmacologists, Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman, who had contracted to study the therapeutic effects of nitrogen mustard, made the connection. In a burst of imagination they entertained the possibility that the war gas possessed a dual nature, that it was a strange Jekyll-and-Hyde compound that could exist both on the battlefield and within a physician’s clinic.

An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid cancers (eradication of white blood cells). But

The body’s initial response to a noxious local insult is to produce a local inflammatory response with sequestration and activation of white blood cells and the release of a variety of mediators to deal with the primary ‘insult’ and prevent further damage either locally or in distant organs. Normally, a delicate balance is achieved between pro- and anti-inflammatory mediators. However, if the inflammatory response is excessive, local control is lost and a large array of mediators, including prostaglandins, leukotrienes, free oxygen radicals and particularly pro-inflammatory cytokines (p. 72), are released into the circulation. The inflammatory and coagulation cascades are intimately related. The process of blood clotting not only involves platelet activation and fibrin deposition but also causes activation of leucocytes and endothelial cells. Conversely, leucocyte activation induces tissue factor expression and initiates coagulation. Control of the coagulation cascade is achieved through the natural anticoagulants, antithrombin (AT III), activated protein C (APC) and tissue factor pathway inhibitor (TFPI), which not only regulate the initiation and amplification of the coagulation cascade but also inhibit the pro-inflammatory cytokines. Deficiency of AT III and APC (features of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC)) facilitates thrombin generation and promotes further endothelial cell dysfunction. Systemic inflammation During a severe inflammatory response, systemic release of cytokines and other mediators triggers widespread interaction between the coagulation pathways, platelets, endothelial cells and white blood cells, particularly the polymorphonuclear cells (PMNs). These ‘activated’ PMNs express adhesion factors (selectins), causing them initially to adhere to and roll along the endothelium, then to adhere firmly and migrate through the damaged and disrupted endothelium into the extravascular, interstitial space together with fluid and proteins, resulting in tissue oedema and inflammation. A vicious circle of endothelial injury, intravascular coagulation, microvascular occlusion, tissue damage and further release of inflammatory mediators ensues. All organs may become involved. This manifests in the lungs as the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and in the kidneys as acute tubular necrosis (ATN), while widespread disruption of the coagulation system results in the clinical picture of DIC. The endothelium itself produces mediators that control blood vessel tone locally: endothelin 1, a potent vasoconstrictor, and prostacyclin and nitric oxide (NO, p. 82), which are systemic vasodilators. NO (which is also generated outside the endothelium) is implicated in both the myocardial depression and the profound vasodilatation of both arterioles and venules that causes the relative hypovolaemia and systemic hypotension found in septic/systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) shock. A major component of the tissue damage in septic/SIRS shock is the inability to take up and use oxygen at mitochondrial level, even if global oxygen delivery is supranormal. This effective bypassing of the tissues results in a reduced arteriovenous oxygen difference, a low oxygen extraction ratio, a raised plasma lactate and a paradoxically high mixed venous oxygen saturation (SvO2). Role of splanchnic ischaemia In shock, splanchnic hypoperfusion plays a major role in initiating and amplifying the inflammatory response, ultimately resulting in multiple organ failure (MOF). The processes involved include: • increased gut mucosal permeability • translocation of organisms from the gastrointestinal tract lumen into portal venous and lymphatic circulation • Kupffer cell activation with production and release of inflammatory mediators.

Terminology and classification Leukaemias are traditionally classified into four main groups: • acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) • acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) • chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) • chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). In acute leukaemia there is proliferation of primitive stem cells leading to an accumulation of blasts, predominantly in the bone marrow, which causes bone marrow failure. In chronic leukaemia the malignant clone is able to differentiate, resulting in an accumulation of more mature cells. Lymphocytic and lymphoblastic cells are those derived from the lymphoid stem cell (B cells and T cells). Myeloid refers to the other lineages, i.e. precursors of red cells, granulocytes, monocytes and platelets (see Fig. 24.2, p. 989). The diagnosis of leukaemia is usually suspected from an abnormal blood count, often a raised white count, and is confirmed by examination of the bone marrow. This includes the morphology of the abnormal cells, analysis of cell surface markers (immunophenotyping), clone-specific chromosome abnormalities and molecular changes. These results are incorporated in the World Health Organization (WHO) classification of tumours of haematopoietic and lymphoid tissues; the subclassification of acute leukaemias is shown in Box 24.47. The features in the bone marrow not only provide an accurate diagnosis but also give valuable prognostic information, allowing therapy to be tailored to the patient’s disease.

Leukoreduction prior to storage removes the white blood cells thereby reducing cytokine generation during storage.

Do you have swollen humor nodes, by that key nutrients square measure blocked from coming into the blood by harmful toxins. A hot stone treatment may well be right for you. maybe you're within the middle of a physiological condition, and you're experiencing hydrops. A foot massage throughout physiological condition may well be acceptable. Massage will really take several forms: hot stones, shiatsu, Swedish, liquid body substance drain, trigger purpose, and sports massage among them. however however square measure massages helpful? For one they will bolster one’s system. In 2010, a report found that obtaining massages will raise the quantity of white blood cells wont to preclude sicknesses. Web MD reports that consistent massages may limit the incidence and severity of headache headaches. How will a hot stone treatment add particular? the warmth from the stones is supposed to form the muscles a lot of relaxed so the massage expert will get to muscles that square measure deeper. If you're considering massage medical aid throughout physiological condition, there square measure sure product which will be useful, as well as physiological condition massage pillows and physiological condition massage tables. If you have got further queries, comments, or tips concerning massage techniques, make certain to share them within the section below. Reference materials. Keep the root phrase How will a hot stone treatment add particular? the warmth from the stones is supposed to form the muscles a lot of relaxed so the massage expert will get to muscles that square measure deeper. If you're considering massage medical aid throughout physiological condition, there square measure sure product which will be useful, as well as physiological condition massage pillows and physiological condition massage tables. If you have got further queries, comments, or tips concerning massage techniques, make certain to share them within the section below. Reference materials. please click here

the case of arteries, oxidization of LDLs causes an inflammation in the cells that make up the arterial wall, which then triggers white blood cells to come and clean up the mess. Unfortunately, the white blood cells trigger a positive feedback loop because part of their response is to create a foam that traps more small LDLs, which then also get oxidized. Eventually, this foamy mixture coagulates into a stiffened accumulation of crud on the artery wall, known as a plaque. Your body fights plaques primarily with HDLs, which scavenge cholesterol from the plaque and return it to the liver. Plaques thus develop not just when LDL levels (again, mostly the small ones) are high but also when HDL levels are low. If

Jesus! How do you misplace someone’s marrow? Chapman can’t wait for anything.” Once again she scanned his blood work on her terminal. “His white cells are gone. He’s neutropenic, for God’s sake!

PJ McAvoy was downright evil. It ran in his blood and grew stronger with every hacking chain-smoking breath. I’d bet if you could see inside his veins, those corpulent white blood cells would be attacking each other out of pure spite.

his chair, just beneath his drawing of the battle between the white blood cell soldiers and the invading E. coli troops. “He doesn’t

However, the morphogenetic field no longer has to account for every-thing. Acceptance of dedifferentiation lets us divide regrowth into two phases and better understand each. The first phase begins with the cleanup of wound debris by phagocytes (the scavenger race of white blood cells) and culminates in dedifferentiation of tissue to form a blastema. Redifferentiation and orderly growth of the needed part constitute the second phase. Simplifying the problem in this way should give biologists an immediate sense of accomplishment, for the first stage is now well under-stood. After phagocytosis, while the other tissues are dying back a short distance behind the amputation line, the epidermal cells divide and mi-grate over the end of the stump. Then, as this epidermis thickens into an apical cap, nerve fibers grow outward and subdivide to form individual synapselike connections the neuroepidermal junction (NEJ) - with the cap cells. This connection transmits or generates a simple but highly specific electrical signal in regenerating animals: a few hundred nanoamperes of direct current, initially positive, then changing in the course of a few days to negative.

White blood cells are the only fully functional cells in the circulation. Red blood cells have lost their nuclei by the time they enter the bloodstream, and platelets, which also lack a nucleus, are cell fragments that have split off a relatively large parent cell known as a megakaryocyte {mega, extremely large + karyon, kernel + -cyte, cell}.

Gratitude works its magic by serving as an antidote to negative emotions. It’s like white blood cells for the soul, protecting us from cynicism, entitlement, anger, and resignation.

This variant is causing your body’s immune system to attack itself. The body is designed to send white blood cells to attack anything it sees as a threat. That could be bacteria, a virus, or any number of toxins. For example, if you get a cut on your finger, the injury site might be red, sore, swollen—that’s a healthy form of inflammation. We call that acute inflammation. “But sometimes, the immune response causes problems. Examples of that are people with peanut or shellfish allergies. Their bodies perceive those foods to be dangerous when they actually aren’t. Arthritis is another example of inflammation causing harm. In this instance, inflammatory cells attack joint tissue. We call this chronic inflammation.

Local blood testing. I use local blood testing to measure some of the nutrients. First, I recommend a 25-OH vitamin D test for most of my patients. I also usually recommend a complete iron panel, vitamin B12, and RBC folate. I discussed this in Chapter 24. RBC magnesium and RBC zinc can also provide some value. However, there are limitations when it comes to testing nutrients through the blood, although this is the case with other methods as well. Micronutrient panels. Some companies focus on micronutrient testing, which involves evaluating all of the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. One of the more well-known labs tests the micronutrients through the white blood cells, specifically the lymphocytes. These lymphocytes are supposed to represent a history of an individual’s

Leukocytes (LEU): These test for disease-fighting white blood cells in your urine.

In Italy one doctor gave intravenous injections of mercuric chloride. Another rubbed creosote, a disinfectant, into the axilla, where lymph nodes, outposts of white blood cells scattered through the body, lie beneath the skin.

refused the narrative of a brown child, his dignity, his right to breathe, his actual fucking existence, with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when my boys first reached for me. This world best invite more than the story of the children bleeding on crisp fall days. Tamir’s death must be more . . . than warning about recklessness & abandoned justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is why I hate it all, the protests & their counters, the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood? But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many brothers already call their tomb.

Technically, “inflammation” describes how the immune system first reacts after it detects a harmful pathogen, something noxious, or a damaged tissue. In most cases, inflammation is rapid and vigorous. Whether the offenders are viruses, bacteria, or sunburns, the immune system quickly launches an armada of cells into battle. These cells discharge a barrage of compounds that cause blood vessels to dilate and become more permeable to white blood cells that swoop in to destroy any invaders. This extra blood flow brings critically needed immune cells and fluids, but the swelling compresses nerves and causes the four cardinal symptoms of inflammation (which literally means “to set on fire”): redness, heat, swelling, and pain. Later, if necessary, the immune system activates additional lines of defense by making antibodies that target and then kill specific pathogens.