Septicemia is a cruel thing.
In the US, there is hysteria about toxins stored in the body. Late-night informercials tell you about substances retained in your gut which contribute to cancer, premature aging, hepatitis, memory loss, and fatigue. Mind, these are toxins — apparently, some entity sovereign from human fecal matter, a third of whose mass is living bacteria.
You can buy pills to rid your body of the stored toxins. They don't do anything about the end result of digestion, just banish the other myriad poisons, whatever they may be — the advertisements don't concern themselves with specifics. Ms. LeGuin brilliantly allegorized consumerism thus: We live in excrement but never mention shit.
Lysis is cell death.
Sometimes.
Lysis is the title of a Socratic dialogue transcribed by Plato. In this case, Lysis is taken to mean friendship. In virtually every sense the word means separation — to the Greeks, this was not-so-subtle irony. So, for us, lysis is separation.
Lysis is more of a suffix than a word. There are many kinds of lyses. Pyrolysis, viral lysis, cytolysis, autolysis. The rhythm lends itself to a song.
Anyone who speaks spanish calls his or her grandfather Abuelo.
Abuelo liked to dance. The rhythm of older Cuban music draws heavily from the non-percussive classical tomes of the Europeans. Instead of gyrating to drums, one sways to melody — thus, movement is not accomplished at regular intervals, but becomes slower, more organic. Of course, the island has historically experienced a shortage of orchestras, so nearly all music comes from guitar.
Pluck the strings lightly. The guitar should not have a deep sound — do it right, and you can make it sound almost like a harp.
When colon cancer replaced Abuelo's lower intestines with a colostomy bag, his dancing became more reserved. He feared shaking the device loose and creating a mess.
Our bodies are moving anthologies of the life cycle. Every second, we lose thousands of red blood cells; they are replaced almost immediately.
Proportionally speaking, cells lead heroic lives. Pus is dead white blood cells. Remember this next time you pop a zit on your cheek.
In cytolysis, cell death results from rupture of the plasma membrane. The cell finds itself in a hypertonic environment, absorbs too much water through osmosis, and pops: cytoplasm and organelles everywhere. Oh well. Sometimes, a stroke in the bigger machine upstairs will throw the metabolism of the myriad cells out of whack, causing them to draw in too much water. Paramecia have a vacule that furiously pumps out excess water, but sometimes this isn't enough. Bye bye paramecium.
Autolysis — now, autolysis is noble. Self-sacrifice. When the cell receives relays indicating its existence is detrimental to the organism at large, its lysosomes release digestive enzymes into the cell body. In effect, the cell digests itself. Curiously, the same thing happens even when the cell is cut off from the otherwise constant feedback saying that it is, indeed, needed. But this is rare in healthy adults. You see it in dying tissue, or injured cells.
Septicemia is a cruel thing.
Urine is sterile, but it's full of the cells who have died making your body work. There is heroism in the unlikeliest of places.
One night on his way to the restroom, my grandfather fell: on impact, his intestines ruptured at the outlet for his colostomy bag, releasing digestive enzymes and fecal matter into his abdominal cavity.
If you had told him forty years previous that his killing blow would come as a result of a full bladder, he would have laughed in your face.
And if he were here now, he'd laugh at the idea of mystery toxins stored in the body. We're all full of shit anyway, he would say, and laugh. He had a dark sense of humor.
People are different from cells. They were able to cut my grandfather open and clean his organs off without immediate death.
Cells reproduce asexually, creating, literally, carbon copies of themselves. My grandfather's genes were strong: two generations later, I have his nose and jaw and build, and I will not be shocked if my hairline starts to recede sometime in the next decade. He made an attractive bald man, but I don't know that I will. As a carbon copy, I'm imperfect.
The damage caused by his digestive enzymes coupled with the dense colonies of bacteria housed in the contents of his intestines resulted in a total-body infection. He was full of IVs, and when we visited him in the hospital he moved his arm. He was stubborn like that.
When he died, his organs had already started to putrefy.
Septicemia is a cruel thing.
Lysis is a cruel thing.
Help with some factoids came from Wikipedia, specifically its articles on cytolysis and autolysis.
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