Cancer Rant, Part II, and the Cunning Fennec Fox

30 April 2014

0724 hrs

Good Morning, Patient Reader!

            I apologize if my ranting the last couple of days has bored you.  It seems that my healthcare/cancer/evolution rant has turned into the story of Miranda.  Here’s another kiddo whose story, in my humble opinion (and since it’s my blog, mine is the only opinion that matters!), that must be told.  So shall I continue?  Splendid!

            I was writing of lust, and how it continues us as a species; how it instinctually propels us toward propagation.  How it, when properly used, which means we must use these brains about which I have been writing, can bring the best kind of pleasure.

            Every woman everywhere, in fact, females of most phyla, emits pheromones.  She casts them off as if an afterthought; a shawl shrugged off as easily as throwing off a suitor.  They spread them around as a virus, and one that is more deadly than smallpox or desire.

            These molecules of a woman’s true scent are first sensed by the olfactory bulbs, the sensitive receptors that begin the olfactory nerve tracts; Cranial Nerve Pair I.  As a consequence, thus begins the first complicated neurotransmissions in a chain of events lasting no longer than a wish.

       

All of us mammals have 12 pairs of cranial nerves, called such because these first nerves (some sensory, some motor, some both) originate in specific areas of the brain itself. The olfactory, optic, oculomotor and trochlear cranial nerves are located in the anterior portion of the brain. The trigeminal, abducens, and facial nerves arise in the pons. The vestibulocochlear nerve arises in the inner ear and goes to the pons. The glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory and hypoglossal nerves are attached to the medulla oblongata. The midbrain, pons, and medulla form what is known as the brainstem itself, our lizard brain; our lissencephaly.

            These Cranial nerve pairs (CNP) are among the first nerves the zygote/embryo develops as a neural tube in utero. There is no coincidence then, when we understand when we understand that these 12 CNP were the very first to evolve in that primitive brain so many millions of years ago. 

            Fittingly, the most ancient nerve pairs are not really nerves at all; the olfactory nerves, CNP I, and the optic nerves, CNP II, are more accurately termed “nerve tracts.”  They are fibrous bundles of highly specialized neurons that are actually sub-sections of the brain itself. 

            Many single-celled organisms use a sense that can only be described as “smell” to seek out food and eschew toxins.  The eyeless flatworm possesses rudimentary organs that orient the creature toward light.

            We share these senses with life forms a billion years older than we are, their carbon still warm from the nuclear fusion of the distant suns that went supernova and spawned them.

            Nature ratchet up that which works, and discards that which does not. 

            These precious nerve bundles, these tracts, pre-date our beating hearts.  They were there in the Cambria and passed along well through the extinction of 99.9% of all life on our fragile planet.  Life struggling to reassert itself, so that she and I, our touches lingering, could falter. 

            Her pupils dilate and I glow with the vision created by the letting-in of more light; through parasympathy, a blurry halo surrounds me like, ironically, that of a saint.

            The image she sees of me is taken in with near-perfect detail; the ridge, the line and the curve.  I am enhanced, eroticized, flawed, and breathtaking.  Her hypothalamus, as does mine, stirs.  All because of CNP II.

            She does not need to know me for her memory to recall these sensations; she remembers the collective me in the tingling endings of neural pleasure.  It is, at that precise moment, all she needs to remember. 

            Our CNP IX, the glossopharyngeal nerves, taste the lovers upon our lips; the lovers we taste in our mouths.  CNP VII, the facial nerve, also has associations with taste. 

            The Autonomic Nervous System, spurred by hypothalamic and other responses, causes parasympathetic nerve fibers to re-route blood, engorging, sensitizing, preparing our bodies for coitus.  These new scents we emit, these new sights we display, perpetuate the cycle of erotic brain-play. 

            Cranial Nerve Pair X, the only one that leaves the head and continues into the thorax, are known as the vagus nerves.  They transmit the signals to our hearts, telling them to pound the oxygen to our increasingly metabolizing cells; our respirations in turn increasing to satisfy the demand, and now our skin, thanks to the Autonomic Nervous System, flushed with blood, feels everything.  And everything, every thing, feels good.

            With the physiological risks involved with these corporeal changes, sex has to be rewarding; pleasurable to the very end.  Otherwise we, as a species, would have perished long ago.

            Whatever it is we call Love can be explained away with neurophysiology.  Since love has no definition, as I repeatedly state quite often, Patient Reader, surely it can be no more than the transmission and reception of squirting neurochemistry.

            Perhaps we invented Love to justify, even force, monogamy.

            Dopamine is happily jumped across our synapses, bringing with it the elation we feel as we turn our gazes upon our True Loves.

            Noradrenalin raises the pulse and the blood pressure, making us breathe faster.  Oxytocin binds me to her, and I offer my supplicant wrists willingly. 

            Marriage is our ritual; a promised proof of our love of one soul mate to another, blah blah blah . . .  created solely by us, Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

            We wave marriage like a firearm, setting and demanding our terms; we wave it as a white flag, surrendering.

            There is Lust and there is what you all call Love, but there is something . . . in between.  Something that lies within the ether; something that lies deep within the complex brain . . . Compassion.

            Coupled with Lust, compassion gives us the ability to respect the other’s needs . . . to abide by a sense of right and wrong and treat our lovers as special creatures deserving of careful patience and the giving of pleasure.  Without compassion, we are simply fuckers.

            Miranda’s seizures were twisting and ugly. 

            They began with eye deviation to the right, as if to confront the grinning demon that is the seizure disorder that harms her (and thanks to CNP VI), then, ipsilaterally, her body contorts in the same direction, twisting her into a “J.”

            Miranda, tight as a coiled spring; the energy within her powerful and potential.

            Miranda, growling as a puma as air is forced from her lungs by constriction and through her vocal folds and clenched teeth. 

            Then she strikes, her spring sprung . . . her energy now powerful and kinetic.  The violent tonic/clonic jerking begins, as does the diaphoresis and the incontinence.  And the horror.

            It is through the cruelest of mercy we saw what Miranda did not . . . we observers were the only witness to this possession, this brains betrayal.  This fury that the broken brain wrought.

            Only we retain the memory of her torture here in this hallway, here in this Children’s Hospital, here in a medical school ranked consistently in the Top Ten.  Here in her oubliette. 

            We are Historians; chroniclers of one another’s frail, fragile and failing frames.  We seek to understand, and our desires to know science, and the accumulated knowledge of it punishes us.  We sin with desire to explain, and the IS wields her lash angrily. 

The Cunning Fennec Fox . . .

Cancer: The Rant Part III, is soon to follow.