Beware The Mandolin

I get this thing called a mandolin slicer for $2.89 at Aldi's and I'm slicing away and the damn potato slips as I draw it back and the blade catches my ring fingertip on my right hand, slices right into the meat about a quarter inch. Bled like crazy, and this after giving blood ...
I stare at my finger, fascinated by the healing process. Would be fun to take a picture every day as it heals. I've had a week now of being off of "repair mode" for the first time in quite a while. My abdomen is just about 100% ... took almost exactly six weeks. Am finally back to doing 100 sit ups. I've been running more, 8 - 10 miles a week. It's been wonderful going around the lake in the mornings.
Weird thing is I felt some weakness and neuralgia about a week ago and I'm thinking and it is either: 1. the added miles are harder than I thought, or,  2. (more likely since I've been running more for a while now) I was having a gluten reaction. It's not easy to stay off of gluten when you are also off of dairy and red meat, and sandwich meats, and added sugar, and anything processed. You can have hummus and peanut butter but you need something to spread it on and rice cakes make me want to stab myself with a fork.
So I go back to Aldi's and found some gluten free bagels and, so far, they've been a light and pleasant substitute (unlike the potato slicer which proved to be a finger-mangling menace). The cinnamon raisin variety are legit yummers. After a couple of days of strict gluten restriction the lingering icky-neuralgic bloating dissipates.
I feel it almost right away now when I eat gluten, as if I'm becoming more sensitive to it. Subway sandwiches have always wrecked havoc on me but I figured what the hell I could try a roasted chicken breast with veggies ... boy was I wrong. Stomach ache right off the bat followed by dull broader pains radiating into my hip and down to my left knee. I could feel the immune response overgeneralizing with waves of heightened nerve sensitivity and swelling, a systemic panic or whatever it is -- appearing to attack soft tissue, its preferred punching bag.
But I've cheated with gluten before without the recent borderline acute response, so what gives?
Healing?
Injuries, almost like the flu, seem to dampen the immune response. Since starting Judo almost constant injuries have been a staple. There was an elevated marker in my blood last year that my Dr. was initially concerned about, mentioning how you see it sometimes in people who are injured, so I mentioned the rib fractures and other miscellaneous injuries and he says "ok that explains it." Really curious about what that marker was, because whatever it is, in it's absence my immune response, even down to skin irritations and joint neuralgia, spikes noticeably. Like a guard dog without enough to do who starts overreacting to anything that moves. This is probably the first time in a very long while that I've been relatively injury free and cheated on gluten. But why would my immune response be in a sense "distracted" by systemic repair? I understand illness (infection) drawing the immune system's attention, but injury doesn't always coincide with infection ... although maybe it did so more commonly in our ancestors? Especially ancestors who couldn't figure out how to use a potato slicer?

That Little Extra ...

That little extra sleep, where you wake up and go to the bathroom at your normal hour but you don't have to go to work so you go back to sleep, here's the thing about that.
My dog, has been dragging ass ... I'm worried about him, need to get him in for his annual, hope he doesn't have heartworm or anything. Anyway he's been dragging, especially on the final mile around the lake, an the pull has thrown me off a little and I have this lingering Achilles strain. So, it's fine and healing but I notice on two consecutive days a significant improvement after that extra hour or two of sleep. Also, it is heavy with vivid dreams. I was under the impression the heavy lifting of repair happened, metabolically, during the the first few hours of sleep, so is this not the case here or maybe this is a case of finishing touches, or is getting up and walking around helping the healing along? Who knows, but there's definitely a difference.
I gave dog a bath and brushed him and #3 took him out for a run and said he didn't notice anything. I also finally ran alone and felt like crap, got outrun for about a mile by an old Guatemalan lady. That's what I get for losing faith in dog. Dog must eat less also. Maybe I am too hard on dog. The floor is too hard on dog ... his bed got wet in the flood and now we let him on the couch but he still mostly lays on the floor. It's cooler i guess.

I tried drawing some after walking through the MAI on Father's Day with the kids. It was wonderful walking through the Japanese galleries. The kids' wrestling around didn't even bother me.

Whatever Doesn't Kill You ...

     Stuck in a bit of a rut. On the heels of three wildly successful lake runs, 8 or 9 falls at the dojo tweaked the ribs for a dose of nighttime stiffness slowing me down again. It's been almost 4 weeks so it's still early, but that's putting it on a "fracture or partial tear" healing schedule. Still hovering around 165 lbs., feeling comfortable and I seem to eat plenty. Could maybe drop to 158 or so ... summer camping weight ... We'll see.
     Gave blood today. I'm O-neg (universal donor) so I'm on this robo-list where I get calls whenever there's a critical need. I think they're just pandering with the, "you're special" angle, but it works ... everyone likes feeling special. 
     Been reading a lot about the healing process and the liver lately. Interesting article in the NYTimes on the liver. Never really considered what it does. Made me wonder about my mom. If she were a multi-millionaire or something could she have gotten herself on a transplant list? Who knows, but one would hope the ethics there are ... ethical. She would not have been a good candidate certainly for transplant because of her age, maybe the cancer, but so many other treatments were out of the range of "worth the gamble" given outcomes ... quite a dilemma, having to choose between months without a treatment or weeks if it goes poorly, remission if it succeeds. Sadly she never had that option. They cut you off past a certain age,  figuring, you've lived your life and your dependents are no longer dependent -- even though to your contemporaries you have barely passed middle age. But that's the Greek islands for you -- sun and earth and onions and olives and tomatoes and coffee so strong it makes your teeth chatter ... Is it any wonder they routinely live into their 90's?
     Anyway the liver's hepatocytes are something of a natural wonder -- complex, flexible genetically, adaptable and prolific, the only cells capable of regenerating. Even with more than two thirds of the liver absent, the liver can regenerate back to it's original size. The liver swells and shrinks on waves of circadian metabolic activity by up to 40%. Filtering blood, infusing it, cleansing and enriching -- the pit crew of the circulatory system. At capacity delivering bulk doses of proteins in the blood at night, while breaking proteins down during the day. The liver is the engine of recovery in a sense, a factory distribution point, and, like an actual distribution center, working feverishly to provide the raw material of healing while we sleep. 
     So the liver, and healing as a whole, is taxed proportionately to current damage reports. Kind of like Scotty in Star Trek fretting about his warp engines coming apart. The higher the damage, the greater the systemic stress in the healing circuit (as if Scotty's liver needed the added stress) ... however, the system is adaptable and  adjusts to increased stress by moving the goal posts. If an organism adapts to a high level of chronic stress, the system in a sense reverts to operating at cruise levels (when those stressors are removed) with a rocket jet repair apparatus in reserve -- perpetual metabolic overkill.
     Now recent studies are pointing to an interesting wrinkle in the aging process -- physical trauma seems to have a rejuvenating effect on aging humans. "Analysis revealed that increasing exercise intensity resulted in a linear increase in the mass of GH secreted." So growth hormone (GH) increases proportionately with exercise intensity, again, provided you avoid going off that precarious "permanent damage" ledge. With permanent damage what doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger, it fucks you up permanently.
     I can't overstate the implication here -- if you can weather the brutal nature of high intensity training you are looking at the "HNL" of recovery ... a veritable holy grail of tissue repair. More importantly, if you can impose a chronic demand for this metabolic power pack, you raise the preparedness norm substantially ... Especially if you aren't trying to take down a Mastadon and are merely walking to the coffee kiosk (after pushing yourself on a heart-bursting ridge run).
     I believe it. I think this is why we all left boot camp feeling like we'd been pumped full of steroids ... not to say we weren't ... "8 consecutive weeks of inoculations" is a bit odd ... just sayin.
     But high intensity exercise is risky, you have to manage the injuries and Judo happens to be the perfect vessel if you're going for "perpetually battered." The sublime little truth about rondori is that all-out physical combat with another human for 3 minutes is brutally taxing (I can't imagine what fighting a chimpanzee would be like). It invariably leaves you with all sorts of 1 - 3 day injuries, bruises, scrapes, mat-burns and scratches. It establishes a norm where at any given moment any number of issues loiter on the healing schedule.

     Fascinating stuff to be sure, reminds me of Conan, no not that Conan, Conan the Barbarian, or maybe Nietzsche.