Cal.E. is playing with the warden’s daughter. She is in the “lap of luxury.” Today, I would like to go away from the usual and present the first draft of a paper I am working on. If you have thoughts or comments (negative or positive) they are welcome
d.c. scot
. THE HUMAN BRAIN; THE LAST FRONTIER
I sat on the edge of my seat as my professor proclaimed that she had once worked in neurology. The human brain holds a fascination for me that I cannot explain, other than its inconsistency. “I found it boring.” was my professor's conclusion of working in neuroscience.
“What?” I thought to myself. “How can something so different in every human being be boring? This question has grown stronger in my mind after having two “routine” brain surgeries (is there a larger oxymoron in the English language than “routine brain surgery?") and one emergency brain surgery that wiped out six weeks of my memory. Consequently, I have no recollection of one of the most dramatic events in recent Greater Houston History, Hurricane Harvey.
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On a particularly slow night, my two work colleagues and I were discussing a question that my son had posed to me. “What is the most important organ in the human body?” asked my middle-school-aged son. I said, at the time, that it was the lungs. If one cannot breathe, he or she will perish quickly.
My co-worker, with whom I had worked for three years, disagreed. “The heart,” she said, without hesitation.
“No,” said the third, most experienced nurse. “It is the brain. Through modern medicine, we can keep the heart beating and the lungs breathing with machines. The same cannot be said of the brain. If one is brain dead, then he or she is dead.” My other coworker and I looked at each other and nodded. The most experienced of us was correct. Artificial brain function is not possible.
The most fascinating thing about the brain is its division of labor. The pea-sized hypothalamus performs seven different functions: body temperature, thirst, appetite and weight control, emotions, sleep cycles, sex drive, childbirth, blood pressure, and heart rate. A lot of the part of the brain that is used for memory, the frontal lobe, (which is the largest part of the human brain) goes unused most of the time (and a lot more often for some of us!)
After my thirteenth ”surgical procedure,” I wondered if it was my brain that caused people like me to have more “health issues” than others who do little or nothing to avoid such things. I will admit that having played football in the late 1970s and early 1980s may have affected my brain negatively. The theory now is that those of us who played football in that era would have been better off without a helmet. We should have played with the same equipment, it is believed, that my father played with, a leather helmet. That way, it would not have been used as a weapon.
In the twenty-first century, steps have been taken to correct that situation. “Targeting” rules (formerly spearing to the head and neck area) have been implemented. However, doing the same would have gotten a player kicked out of a football game forty years ago (I know this from personal experience).
As equipment has evolved and rules have changed, players have gotten bigger, faster, and stronger. If a 250-pound man with five percent body fat hits someone running 22 miles per hour, it can wreak havoc.
This brings to mind a game I was watching with my favorite team playing. My team was not doing well. Our most popular player, a defensive lineman, created a strip-sack of the other team’s quarterback on our twelve-yard line. He then picked the ball up and began running full speed toward the other team’s goal line. “Number 99 is going to score!” The announcer proclaimed.
“Undoubtedly,” I thought. “No one is even chasing him. Unless he spikes the ball on the five-yard line (not his style) he WILL score a touchdown (he did, and my team won the game. By one touchdown.) I am no physics major, but I can reason why the popular player was allowed to score without being challenged. He was not the fastest player on the field. A fast running back or wide receiver from the other team may have been able to catch him. They did not try. Why? Let me think. A 289- pound man, with seven percent body fat running 19.8 miles per hour. I can see the coroner now, with his paperwork presenting him with a conundrum. That being, “Should I list his cause of death as suicide or just pure stupidity?”
Stupidity, however, contrary to popular belief, can be detrimental to linemen in the game of football. Repeated head trauma may be why CTE is such a problem with those who play the positions that number 99 on my favorite team and I did is the theory in the modern era..
However, my linemate, whom I lined up next to for six years, never seemed to suffer the same consequences I did. Even though I outweighed him by 10-15 pounds (and we were both VERY undersized for offensive linemen), he never had the issues I did. And he played MORE than I did. He started at center a year before I started at guard, in both junior high and high school. Number 52 went on to earn his engineering degree from the top engineering school in our state. Weird.
It is not a question of having a low threshold of pain for me. In fact, the opposite may be true. I have finished six marathons, a fifty-mile run (the last six on one semi-healthy leg after hyperextending my unbraced knee in a mud puddle at mile forty-four) a 50-k run (again, with a hyperextended knee- but the other one this time), four one-half Iron Man distance triathlons, and a full Iron Man distance triathlon. After one of my more involved surgeries, my surgeon looked at me and said, “With your threshold of pain, if you rate your pain over a six on a zero to ten scale, go to the E.R. QUICKLY!”
My thought, at that point, was, "Did I borrow years from the end of my life when I exerted myself so much when I was younger, ignoring pain to accomplish a goal that few people ever achieve? Did my two known concussions, combined with my repeated head trauma as a teenager make me more vulnerable to something called normal pressure hydrocephalus? And does that condition affect the rest of my body negatively?” I believe that the human brain holds the answers to these and many other questions if we just knew which questions to ask.
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