Yourself?

A lifetime in a Heartbeat.

This morning's guest lecturer was an old man who spoke to us on the cardiovascular system. His enthusiasm about the heart was really infectious. He cut the heart up with his echocardiographic tools, dissected it in numerous ways. Spoke about the arteries supplying the haeart as fondly as if they were his own children. When the heart beat on his echocardiogram, he would enthusiastically call out Sys, Dy, Sys, Dy, Sys, Dy. All the while, valves were closing, ventricles were clasping, and atria were dialating. The violence of systoli juxtaposed with the feminity of diastole.

The cadence of the heartbeat on screen merged with the rhythm of his voice. And his years of examining the root of life came through to me. It's impossible to say what exactly is so moving about the pulsation of the heart on screen.

Tribal afternoons millenia ago, the beat of the drums, and the chants of a long gone age. Surf music. Hip hop, the heavy bass beats in 4/4 time. The flutter of a newborn, a heartbeat that sounds like the flapping of wings. The pulse of my grandmother, slow but obstinately strong.

The stream of blood flows. The stream of life, that flows through every one of us today, just as it has flowed yesterday and will keep on flowing tomorrow.

When prof was younger, did he imagine the future today? When he was poring over his books, his atlases in the formalin-perfumed anatomy halls of the past, dissecting a piece of dead flesh, broken machinery, and imagining how it once danced with the pulse of life. Did he see how it must have danced in his patients? Did he imagine, that one day, he might see the heart live, not through the barbarity of a open chest operation, but through the magic of waves invisible to the eye, in three dimensional colour, with superlative detail?

An old man told his children stories today. About a journey through the unknown, with revelations at every corner. A jigsaw, which took a lifetime to piece together. And in the end, to see with his very own eyes, what he always knew was there.

posted by Downhere. @ 9:09 am