Friday, David mentionned that Sébastien had bled through his ostomy and his hemoglobin count was low. I get confused between hemoglobins, white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets, so I googled “What is blood made of” and thought of sharing the answers with you…
In one sentence, blood is a mixture of three cells and plasma – a watery liquid. It also contains hormones, nutrients, clotting agents and waste products on their way out. The three kinds of cells are red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. Each one has a different mission.
Red blood cells are the most numerous. Shaped like donuts with an indentation instead of a hole, they carry oxygen from the lungs and disperse it throughout the body, carrying it in molecules called hemoglobin. Imagine the hemoglobin as a bucket with four red compartments. When it arrives at the lungs, a molecule of oxygen fits in each compartment, and is carried away to the capillaries. The capillaries are the ports of arrival in our body, the tiniest blood vessels, where the exchange of water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients and waste chemicals takes place. Capillaries don’t have alot of oxygen, so, our bucket of hemoglobin, on the ship of a red blood cell, gives up its oxygen and picks up some carbon dioxide in exchange. The four red compartments of the bucket are really four atoms of iron, which give the red blood cell its color.
White blood cells are our body’s military, fighting off infection and invasion. As in the armed forces, there are three main branches: the army, the navy and the air force. White blood cells have granulocytes, lymphocytes, and monocytes. In detail, the granulocytes, come in three different types: neutrophils, eosinophils, and basophils. (The more in detail you get, the longer the names…) The first take care of bacteria, ingesting and digesting them. The second take care of parasites and the third is involved in allergies. Back up a level, to the second kind of white blood cells, the lymphocytes are subdivided in two: T cells and B lymphocytes. The T cells are the immune system directors. The B lymphocytes produce antibodies. Back up to the three kinds of white blood cells, the third, the monocytes are the largest white blood cells, and enter the body’s tissue to turn into even larger cells called macrophages which eat foreign bacteria and destroy damaged, old or dead cells of the body.
Platelets are the clotting cells of the blood family, taking care of wounds and cuts in a variety of ways: clumping up to form a clot, or breaking down when exposed to air and releasing a substance that starts a chain of chemical events, ending in a protein transforming into fibrin which forms into long threads that tangle up red blood cells and form a clot. (Yes, that was a run-on, but this is biology and not grammar!)
Plasma, the fluid that the blood cells travel in, is 90% water. The rest is protein molecules, sugar, electrolytes, hormones, vitamines and cholesterol.
My dad would find that this blog post is in keeping with my researcher’s attitude… during summer, he would laugh as I brought home a pile of books from the library on some research project or other that I’d invented for myself. The main source of information for this post comes from a PBS website article and Wikipedia.
Sunday, David left for Toronto early, as he had only been planning to leave Wednesday morning. We’d only just left David after a leisurely breakfast together at Stella’s when he called to ask for a ride. Sébastien bled again in his ostomy, and developped a fever on Sunday. David mentionned that he was septic and rather than ask him the definition, we looked it up later, and found that the web-as-doctor was still just as frightening. My husband and I hate to prod figuring that eventually the questions we don’t ask will get answered when the sting of less-than-cheerful news fades. Some view it as a fault, as though avoiding the subject shows a lack of interest, but we see it more as a desire to tread lightly. It is quite well known that men and women have very different emotional responses. A quote from “Married with Special-Needs Children” explains it well:
One wife who understood this provided excellent advice: “I think it is very important to remember that moms and dads react very differently to the diagnosis. The journey to acceptance is a grieving process. Moms often blame themselves, while the dads are more removed.”
/…/ In general, men are more prone to withdraw or attack problems pramatically rather than with emotional expression, whereas women place more value on talking about their feelings.
The second main reason we need to expect – rather than resist – differences in emotional response and coping styles is that opposites attract. We tend to become partners with people who have qualities we desire but lack. We are initially attracted to these differences and intuitively seek them as a kind of balance to ourselves. Unfortunately, we often subsequently have a growing discomfort with these same differences. For example, the man who represses his own feelings yet chooses an emotional wife may discover that her expressiveness churns his own emotions up un a way that he can’t stand.
Before setting a record for the longest post on Place de choix, I’ll finish with a quote from Emily Dickinson:
It’s all I have to bring today
This, and my heart beside
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