AUGUST 13, SUNDAY

CELLS AGAIN

I started reading The Song Of The Cell by Bharati Mukherjee while still in Asheville and have continued to read it after arriving here in Montevideo. But my reason for reading shifted after I got here. On my birthday, Friday, two days ago in the evening I began to feel achy and started shivering during the night. In the morning I took a Covid Test and registered two very bright pink stripes, no light pink or faint pink, this was the real thing.

So my plans shifted. No longer was I going to go out and take photographs, I was going to sit right here until I got better. Not knowing what to do in Montevideo to treat Covid I called the owner of the apartment I am staying in, Daina, who lives half the year here and half the year in Canada. She immediately took over and called the British Hospital here to see if I could get the equivalent of Paxlovid, which seemed to help a year ago when I got Covid. It turned out that I needed a doctor’s prescription to get the equivalent of Paxlovid. I could go to the British hospital, but it was easier and cheaper to get a doctor to come visit me here. But when she tried to arrange that the doctor said that the Paxlovid equivalent wasn‘t available so that there was no point in coming and prescribing it. I should wait three days and I would probably recover just fine. So that is what I am doing. Daina arranged for neighbors on my floor of the building to get me food and medicine. So I am comfortable and waiting patiently with what only feels like a bad cold.

But I needed to have something to do so I continued reading Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human. The book summarizes the history of medicine with particular emphasis on the cell, which it turns out is the basis for life on earth and which is so complicated that even though he writes lucidly and simply is too much for me to understand. It is a popular introduction to the cell. I have just read the chapter on the pandemic which challenged and dislocated the vast knowledge of modern medicine and humbled doctors like him. It took the medical profession forever to figure out what was going on.

The first thing the book taught me was how complex the cell is and how much more complicated the way cells band together to form organs of various kinds with ordinary cells, most alike, developing different capabilities determined by the DNA instructions in every cell. How this happens is a mystery. But running through this history is the way that certain cells have a built in ability to identify foreign elements in the body, including viruses, and chew them up and dispose of them. But to do this these protective cells have to be able to identify what is foreign and what is part of the body, what is self. Otherwise they can attack the body and cause illness. The problem with cancer cells is that they appear to these protective cells as being part of the body and therefore can‘t be induced to attack these rapidly expanding cancer cells. So we use external means, radiation and chemotherapy to try and target and destroy cancer cells.

But the same is true to some degree for the covid virus. The protective cells don‘t recognize the virus, but when the virus finally caused damage to the body that these protective cells did recognize, then they attacked full force but attacked the infected cells, such as the cells in the lungs, and caused more destruction than the virus does.

I, along with all other octogenarians, were scared to death by stories of older people with scarred lungs who were unable to breath and who died alone or on Facetime in the ICU in horrible ways.

And then came the first vaccinations, which I understand were simply allowing the protective cells to recognize the Covid virus and to fight back. We could get sick but when our protective cells kicked in they would fight back would begin healing process to that we did not have to go to the hospital and pretty certainly wouldn‘t die.

This lifted the great fear and I started to travel. In July, 2022 I circled the country on Amtrak, wearing my mask, and on the day after returning I got Covid, thankfully in my own house and my own bed. I kept on traveling, now feeling even more immune since my protective cells had been able to deal the real thing. By this time politicians and the public had decided they had had enough so that no one wore a mask. When Susie, Todd and I traveled for three months in India, the Baltic states and Europe after Christmas almost no one wore a mask. But I knew, everyone knew, that Covid was still in the air and that people were still dying in large numbers. But we were all determined to ignore it. On my three flights to Montevideo I was the only person on any flight to be wearing a mask. But it didn‘t protect me and three days later I came down with Covid.

But this case is even milder than the first time I got it, otherwise I would be feeling too sick to write here. And it won‘t keep me from going to Sicily and Greece for October and November with my son and his family.

But the irony is that, through Mukherjee, for the first time I have a sense, only a vague sense, of the tremendously complicated battle going on within me as my T-Cells fight back. But there is much, much, much more going on inside me than my fighting off Covid. For the first time the shift from single celled life to multicelled life and the development of all the organs that keep me alive and how they developed, suddenly seem miraculous. Only one of the functions of some cells is to protect me from outside invasion or to heal injuries. It is everything else that cells do, with billions of instruction embedded in the helix strands of DNA in every cell in the body which has to be transcribed and reformed every time the cells divide in the process of growth and regeneration and healing, each cell a mini universe, that bowls me over. And all of this is going on without my knowledge, my body is a multifunctional factory that hums along day and night, constantly adjust itself, without my knowledge, storing energy and clearing out wastes and so much more. I think of it as my body, but that is only as seen from the outside. What is complicated beyond belief is what is going on inside. All I can sense right now is sniffles and a cough and shivering at night. But deep inside me these minuscule cells are somehow make the decisions that keep me alive in ways that I cannot understand.