21 | February | 2013

Human Heart
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

My heart was examined once again today using ultrasound to create an echocardiogram. This is standard practice because the anthracycline based chemotherapy I’ve endured and the Herceptin I’m continuing to receive are both known to cause damage to the heart. I’ll find out next week if my 10 oz bundle of muscle is as healthy as it was three months ago. I certainly hope so and in three months time – all things being equal – it’ll be checked again.

The heart is an amazing piece of equipment. It beats around 100,000 times in a day, circulates blood through some 60,000 miles of blood vessels and if looked after can last a lifetime without needing too much maintenance. It’s also thought the heart can contain ‘cellular memories’ – recollections of the events we experience, preferences and attitudes we hold. Although the idea of cellular memory is fiercely contested there are some astonishing and as yet unexplained examples, including the 8-year-old girl who provided information that led to the apprehension of her heart-donors murderer.

Irrespective of whether we believe cellular memory or not, if we start out from the premise that every day is the best day of the year I suspect it might help us be happier about what we have instead of feeling miserable about the things we don’t have.

You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now. ~ Joan Baez

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older. ~Larry McMurtry, Some Can Whistle.

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well. ~George MacDonald

Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised? Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard? No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish. ~Robert Brault

Tomorrow is a work of fiction, every day some of us discover tomorrow never comes. So live today, all day and write on your heart that its the best day of the year 🙂

Plastic is a man-made menace.

– Scientists estimate up to one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from eating plastic (Source: Monterey Bay Aquarium).
– On Midway Atoll, 40% of albatross chicks die of starvation or dehydration. Their stomachs are full of OUR trash.
– Nearly 90% of floating marine litter is plastic, supple, durable materials such as polyethylene and polypropylene, Styrofoam, nylon and saran (Source: LA Times).
– BPA and other chemicals from plastics also leach into OUR bodies. Regular monitoring by the CDC showed more than 90% of us have detectable levels of bisphenol A (BPA) in our bodies.
– One large, well-conducted study in humans showed that people who had high levels of BPA in the urine had a higher rate of diabetes, heart disease, and liver toxicity. (Source: WebMD).
– A six-year study by a team of researchers from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom examined the occupational histories of 1,006 women from Ontario’s Essex and Kent counties who had breast cancer and 1,146 who didn’t. Adjustments were made for smoking, weight, alcohol use, and other lifestyle and reproductive factors. The results, published online in the journal Environmental Health (19th November 2012) showed women employed in the automotive plastics industry were almost five times as likely to develop breast cancer prior to menopause as women in the control group.
– In January 2010, the FDA announced an important reversal of its 2008 claims regarding the safety of bisphenol-A, expressing new concern about “potential effects of BPA on the brain, behaviour and prostate gland of foetuses, infants and children” (Source: Science Daily)

For the sake of our planet’s wildlife and ecosystems, for your own sake and for the sake of everyone’s children, please consider your use of plastics.

We all need to clean up our act.

naomikko