Cell Injury
To begin at the beginning: long before there is realization of aches and pains, of being unwell, of a change in our bodies, it is the cell which perceives injury and responds to it.
Insights and impact
- Injuries range from physical, chemical, biological, immunological etc
- We are aware of some, unaware of many
- Mental stress is often unrecognizable as an injury
- Slow injuries last long, leave residual damage
- Physicians and lifestyle gurus alike must remember that injuries at the cellular level far exceed the limited effects assessed clinically in severity and enormity
Rhythm ‘n Rhyme
A cell’s story: adapt, survive or surrender
I hurt often in your lifetime, from without or within
Alive at the mercy of my friends: oxygen and nutrition;
When you hurt me carelessly with smoking or unaccustomed pilates
With hypertrophy I stretch and grow, in hyperplasia multiplication is my fate;
Young girls with anorexia and shriveled, bent old men
Cause me to atrophy, sometimes turn brown, and shrink to my den;
On mucosal surfaces, if I am damaged repeatedly
I put on a metaplasia mask: you cannot identify me readily.
I cannot fight your inherited genes or your own McDonald lifestyle
In storage disorders I accumulate, through your high ‘spirits’ in the liver fat I pile;
When overwhelmed by stress I accept the coup de grâce
In apoptosis a solitary exit, in necrosis death en masse at a fast and furious pace;
Your lifespan is my destiny too, telomerases tick the clock
I may live to be a hundred or in the graveyard in senescence dock…
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