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.
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