Meditation 3: My Lungs Are Fresh and Yours to Keep

This week, we finally managed to push past muscles, nerves and vessels, and we are having our first experience with organs. The terrible (and perhaps also great) thing about being a chemist is the tendency to break things into their very small parts. It is sometimes easy to denigrate anything in nature to its small pieces. When you look at it on a small enough level, all biology is chemistry [and all chemistry is physics, which is an existential problem I deal with every day]. Because the entire body is carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a whole host of other elements, it is easy to forget just how amazing a human body is. Similarly, when you are crudded down in the actual facts of living--the actual mechanical aspects--it is easy to forget that the body before you was once an actual human being.

The best--and thus most-pride-inspiring--story I ever wrote was about a physicist and his son. The physicist was dying of lung cancer, and his estranged son had returned home--much against his will--to care for his dying father. I chose lung cancer because I had seen it firsthand: standing in an operating room at Emory, Dr. Halkos had pointed out the bilateral dense spots in the lungs. "Cancer in both lungs," he said. "You can't take them both out." In other words, cancer in both lungs is a death sentence. If you are old, and can't withstand the radiation, even more so.

"The cancer had invaded his lungs, and my life, slowly," I wrote. Make no mistake about it: disease is an invading army: it eats our stores of food, ravages our women, and burns our fields. In my time at Emory, I had seen it all first-hand. I had read scores of CT images, learned to point out cancer, or necrosis, or strictures in vessels. I had seen infections that had taken over bodies, palpated hernias, watched a woman die on a table because she had refused an aspect of her treatment because of her religion. All this, and more, I saw.

On Tuesday, we brutally cut into the thoracic cavity and saw lungs, the first organs we have seen in the body. With no small amount of wonder, we pressed into them and were surprised--if only a little--to find that one of them was twice the size of the other. The smaller one was much harder to the touch, and today we found that it had adhered to the mediastinum, the tissue that encloses the heart. It is our best guess that--perhaps ironically, perhaps appropriately--the cause of death was lung cancer.

I'm not really sure what my point is--except, maybe, for this: for one small blinding moment, I felt a certain sudden sadness for this woman who had suffered, died, and been so unselfish as to let a bunch of twenty somethings cut so amateurishly into her body, accidentally lopping through important nerves and vessels and tearing, unintentionally, her frail muscles.

Her physical heart is so small, compared to others we have seen, but I think there is no doubt that her metaphorical heart--the heart of kisses, tears, and compassion--was anything but.