lavanderblues

Saturday, October 23, 2004

how we die...

ten thousand ways we could die...
on heart failure alone: angina, infarction... your myocardium (cardiac muscles) become weak/die, resulting in reduced blood flow to your other parts of the body. by normal homeostasis, your kidney makes up for the decrease in blood volume by increasing reabsorption of water and salts into your blood; ie more fluids in your body. heart pumps weakly, fluid accumulates in the end of your limbs and in your lungs (the far ends of both the greater and weaker circulatory systems as they are classically known)... and you literally drown in your own body fluids. From the inside.
On the outside, in the meantime, you are weaker, your blood vessels are likely to have an aneurysm, your legs are swollen with excess fluid, breathless, chest pains (angina pectoris), tinge of blue on your lips and fingertips due to insufficient oxygen.. eventually you die cos of a burst blood vessel when you suddenly exert (remember the aneurysm?) or pneumonia, or kidney/liver failure.

"Heart disease begets heart disease"... like a positive feedback cycle. haiz.
One malfunction affects almost every other organ in your body, and you could just die as a result, from a thousand other ways from the rest of the other organs.

haha been reading this book i got last time "How we die"... its depressing yet clinically interesting. At this very moment as i sit here typing, and you sit here reading, we all have already begun the long ardous process of dying. Our DNA are constantly being mutated by mutagens, eventualy we accumulate enough of them to get cancer (tt's y cancer usually occurs in older ppl). Alternatively, our cells, whether brain or not, are constantly dying, and some of these are irreplaceable and we degenerate slowly...OR... imagine the plaque of lipids accumulating in your blood vessels resulting in artherosclerosis... etcetcetc.

Amazing how a million and one ways can eventually lead all of us to the same end. HMMZ.

lin~*
8:44 pm