You Are A Miracle
By: Michael Trigg
Tags: Homo Sapiens, Humans, Miracles, Body, Human Beings Are Cool

You Are A Miracle

Image By: John Jackson, Unsplash

Imagine the odds of you being conceived. Not just a baby, but YOU. Your mother had one egg waiting for a sperm. And your father contributed around 100 million of them when you were created. One of those 100 million won the race and there you were. If that one sperm that caused you to be created had come in second, and another sperm had won, you would be someone else entirely. That, I think is a miracle.

So here you are today. A human being, a homo sapien, a bi-pedal hominid, a person, call yourself what you will. You are unique. Nobody has ever seen the world as you see it through your eyes and no one ever will. Your vision, your sense of smell, your hearing, your taste, and touch are all delivered through your brain. The amazing machine.

Your brain is an incredible organ; it is unique among the calculating machines in the world today. If the possibility of a brain transplant existed and you took advantage of that operation and let's assume it was successful, you would not be you. You would be the person from whom the brain was donated. This is totally unlike any other organ in the body.

Currently, medical science is transplanting many organs including the following list to date.

Image By: National Cancer Insititute, Unsplash

Organs most often transplanted include:

The kidneys: Reasons-diabetes, polycystic kidney disease, and lupus.

The liver: Reasons-cirrhosis, which has many causes.

The heart: Reasons-coronary artery disease, cardiomyopathy, heart failure, and a variety of other heart problems.

The pancreas: Reasons-diabetes.

The lungs: Reasons- cystic fibrosis, COPD, asthma, and other problems.

The small intestine: Reasons-short bowel syndrome caused by necrotizing enterocolitis, Crohn’s disease, and other problems.

Two major components of your amazing body are blood and skin. Blood is both a tissue and a fluid. It is a tissue because it is a collection of similarly specialized cells that serve particular functions. These cells are suspended in a liquid matrix called plasma, which turns the blood into a fluid.

Image By: Pawel Czerwinski, Unsplash

The average adult has between 1.2 and 1.5 gallons of blood in their body. The percentage of salt in your blood is about 9 parts per thousand compared to seawater that is on average around 34 parts per thousand.

Skin is an organ. It is the largest organ in or on your body. The average adult body has about 22 square feet of skin. To get an idea of that amount of skin, a standard doorway is 21 square feet. The average adult’s skin would fill all of that space and a bit more.

Your heart is basically a very hardy, muscular pump. Each day it beats or expands and contracts 100,000 times and pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through the arteries and veins of your body. If you live to be 70-year years of age, your heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times. If you are reading this and you are over 70, keep on beating.

Image By; thoughtco.com

If you were to lay out all of the arteries, capillaries, and veins in an average adult, lengthwise they would stretch about 60,000 miles or 100,000 kilometers in length. The capillaries are the smallest of the blood vessels and they make up about 80 percent of the total length of the blood carrying “piping” in your body.

Your other bodily organs carry out the following work, just so you can keep on humming:

The kidneys filter about a half cup of blood every minute.

The liver your blood and breaks down, balances, and creates nutrients, and also metabolizes drugs into forms that are easier for your body to use. All the blood leaving the stomach and intestines passes through the liver.

The pancreas creates enzymes that break down sugars, fats, and starches and also helps your digestive system by making hormones.

Your lungs breathe in between 2,100 and 2,400 gallons of air each day. This is the amount needed to oxygenate the 2,400 gallons or so of blood that is pumped through your heart daily.

Your intestines are not only there for digestion: they also produce various substances that carry messages to other parts of your body. They play an important role in fighting germs and regulating your body’s water balance.

Your body is an incredible working machine. Don’t take it for granted. Many of us abuse these wonderful partners of our minds by eating the wrong foods, using toxic drugs, drinking too much alcohol, and not doing any exercise that helps to keep us functioning.

So, congratulate your body. It's the only vehicle YOU have. You just have to figure out who you are. This of course is a whole nother subject for discussion — figuring who the metaphysical person is in your physical body.

If you have any comments, disagreements, or additional information on this post, please contact me either through Medium, or through my website.

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