I promised I would say some more about the body's machinery, so here it is on the 20th day of Dry July.
Day | Thursday 20th July |
|---|---|
Days without alcohol | 35 |
Funds raised | $3,159.86 |
Badges earned | 2 weeks Dry |
I'm feeling | Like I'd quite like a drink |
Machinery of life
Our bodies are made up of around 100 trillion cells of all different kinds. Like Lego pieces each type is different, but they all have some things in common.
Groups of cells are very community-minded; they somehow know how many of them are required for growth, damage repair or to replace the ones that are dying off of natural causes.
One of the things they all have in common is they reproduce themselves by dividing, most frequently through a process called mitosis (there’s another process call meiosis but that is X-rated and not suitable for a family blog). Cells produce signals to control the rate of cell division.
I won’t go into the process of how this works, suffice to say that reading about it gave me a whole new vocabulary. It’s incredibly complex and the thing that strikes me most is how well it works most of the time, given that it is happening billions of times a day in every person’s body.
But of course, no process is ever perfect, random variations and mistakes happen all the time. Most of the time this isn’t a problem; instead of a new pair of healthy cells emerging from a single cell division one or both of the cells are defective in some way. The body can cope with quite a bit of this, because usually the defective cells are just a bit useless and not very viable, so they don’t do any damage and they don’t hang around for long. The immune system also plays a role in tidying these up if need be.
There’s also a connection to aging which we don’t fully understand. I’m willing to bet that once we do fully understand these processes we will crack the secret of immortality, but I digress.
A rare event
On thankfully very rare occasions something really bad happens. A defective cell is not only viable and capable of surviving well it is also unwilling to follow the rules set by the community of cells. It rapidly establishes itself and starts to grow out of control. We call these cells malignant which comes from a Latin word meaning to behave badly.
Malignant cells are not easy for the body to deal with because they break all the rules. They shoulder healthy cells aside, find ways of getting more food by attracting more than their fair share of blood supply and generally behave like a ram-raider in a jewelry store. In tissue cancers clumps of malignant cells grow into tumours.
As tumours grow, bits can break off and be distributed throughout the body via the blood or lymphatic system in a process called metastasis, from a Greek word meaning to transition or change location.
Risk
No one is immune from cancer, just as no one is immune from car crashes. People who get cancer are mostly just unlucky, it’s a random event that can strike anyone at any time.
But there are plenty of ways we can increase our risk. Driving carefully doesn’t make you immune from crashing because, as my mother used to put it, there’s always the fool in the other car. Equally you will often get away with driving recklessly, but you are still increasing your chances of a crash if you do.
So it is with cancer, living a healthy life and doing all the right things won’t guarantee that you won’t get it. Exposing yourself to carcinogens like alcohol won’t guarantee that you will, but it does increase the risk.
It’s a numbers game, the longer we live and the greater the risks we take the greater the chances are that something bad will happen to us.
So, we have a choice. My choice is to be a bit careful, at least for this month.
You can support my choice by donating here.
Thanks for reading!
Comments