Wait, turns out, I already have it!
And so does everyone else!
Turns out our immune systems are way, way more complicated and amazing than I thought. I am thoroughly wowed.
I mean, we all learn about white blood cells attacking intruders in school. And we all have at least some idea that vaccines work by using dead germs to teach out immune systems how to fight off that particular germ without us having to get the infection.
So nice for vaccines to do for us while they are installing Bill Gates’ microchips.
But there is so much more going on. That white blood cell stuff is only one part of the primary defense force. There’s also things with exotic names like macrophages[1] and dendritic cells[2] and those are the only two on the list I recognize.
And like I said, that’s just the initial defense force – the shock troopers of the innate immune system. They do a great job against most routine threats, but the real action goes down in the adaptive immune system.
That’s like your secret military lab where all the really cool stuff happens.
Because it doesn’t just store the information about things you’ve been exposed to. Oh no no. That’s kiddie stuff.
It also combines and recombines parts of your DNA in order to come up with brand new protein keys to stuff that might not even exist yet.
That blows my mind. It’s like a high intensity government lab in there.
Now obviously, randomly generated strings of protein could turn out to be hostile to not just germs but us too. Germ research is dangerous stuff.
So the protein keys then go to an organ called the thalamus, which for the record I HAD heard of before I saw the video, but that’s it.
Could not have told you where it was, what it did, or what it looked like.
And now I know!
Anyhow, when the genetic keys get to the thalamus, it’s killin’ time. The thalamus tests each key and if it does anything remotely like attacking a healthy cell, the thalamus terminates it with extreme prejudice and a teeny tiny gun.
One would assume.
Most genetic keys do not make it through this winnowing, but the few that do get added to the body’s extensive library of keys and then there is one more hostile micro-organism your body can defeat without ever having encountered it.
So the way it works is that when a new, non-routine threat enters the body, the innate immune system tackles it and slows it down until the adaptive immune system can find the right key, fit it to one of its agents, then NUKE THAT SHIT FROM ORBIT.
And that’s so freaking cool it hurts. Such a sophisticated process, elegant and deadly, and all to keep us safe from germs.
Dunno why we still get sick, but when I find the video that explains that, I will come back and explain it to you, too.
More after the break.
Ice cold fingers
Is it a bad sign when your heart feels cold?
And not just in an emotional sense. That’s normal, for me. I’ve been left out in the cold for as long as I could remember.
But no, I mean literally cold. As if I had been outside in winter. But only in that area above and around my ribcage.
Eh, it’s probably nothing. Can’t let the hypochondria creep up on me. It’s been in remission for decades now but it’s by no means gone and it never will be and I am aware of that and accept it.
Some doors can’t be closed once they’ve been opened, and the door that turns my neurosis into psychosomatic (attic insane) symptoms and convinces me that I am dying is one such door for me.
Now I feel all weird fo having brought it up. Probably was a bad idea to go poking around that part of my mind.
Oh well, can’t undo it now. Maybe this will help me process some of the memories from that dark time in my early 20’s when I had my nervous breakdown.
Or lack of memories, given that when it was at its worst, I lost whole sections of a day. I would find myself unable to remember that happened for an entire morning, afternoon, or evening. One day spent lying on the couch feeling miserable and watching TV while not being able to keep even water down was so much like the other that they all blended together into a huge morass of undifferentiated purgatory.
That still happens to me sometimes. Not lately, because I’ve had my twice weekly Wound Care appointments to help differentiate the days plus I am not nearly as depressed as I was when it was happening but still.
There are times when I feel like all my days are telescoping together and collapsing into a single eternal point in time which pins me in place like a bug and traps me forever.
It’s very scary. I’ve learned to snap myself out of it by forcing my mind into the here and now and the literal, physical truth of existence.
Like I said yesterday, it’s cold out here in the worlds outside the walls of mundane existence. I wish my existential claustrophobia did not force me to live out here for fear of becoming “trapped”.
I want to be somewhere warm and solid and reassuringly real so I can finally stop keeping my world together through sheer will and imagination and let reality generate itself for a while.
Yeah. That sure would be nice.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.