I wonder if I've been changed in the night...

"I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!" Alice, Alice in Wonderland

As I read this simple passage over and over again, I can't help but notice its depth and relevance to all of our lives. Figuring out who you are may be a life-long endeavor, but everyone has to start it. If we don't know who we are, then we don't know anything: we don't know what we want, we don't know what we believe, and we certainly don't know what we don't believe.

"You possess only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck." Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali

Reflecting on this quote from imam Ghazali (r), it really brings home for me two concepts. Firstly, that your deeds or actions are what make you who you are, and they are not lost, as Allah (swt) has a clear record of all that is done. Secondly, were you to survive this shipwreck, what would you be left with? Your material earnings will not define who you are and all that will be left is yourself. So who are you, really?

How exactly does a person "find themselves"? I always picture a shot-gun trip to a third-world country, or a routine morning jog along the beach- but who has time for that? I think finding yourself means taking every single aspect of your life, every single interaction, and every single detail, and evaluating yourself in relation to it. Find out what you believe and really believe in it. Find out what you want, and sincerely pursue it. Find out who you are and keep learning to be better by being honest with yourself about your flaws.

I think the best two scenarios that allow us to bring out our raw character are times of hardship and times of comfort. In hardship we find our weaknesses and our vulnerabilities, and in comfort we find our negligence and carelessness. Though hardships humble us through methods that are seemingly unbearable, getting through them provides us opportunities to grow and learn. And what could we be more thankful for? Sometimes it takes being dragged and torn to figure out all the pieces that you are made of.

So why is it so important to figure out who you really are? Because if you don't know who you are, no one else truly does either, and all of a sudden, you're no one.

All men should strive
to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why.
James Thurber

Any given time

When the going gets tough and I start to think that I should have been built with bigger shoulders to carry the stress, I find an immediate release upon remembering what Allah (swt) says in surat al-bakara, ayah 186: "when My servants ask you concerning Me, I am indeed close (to them): I answer the prayer of every supplicant when he calls on Me" Qur'an 2:186. Soon after, I slip back and succumb to the stress, but reminding myself over and over again that He is there any given time gives me the bits of strength that I need to get by.

Sometimes just knowing that someone is there to bear the load with me is enough, and more often than not, I find no one. After anger and desperation, I finally remember that I'm not the only one that knows my situation. Allah (swt) knows what I'm going through because He is the One that's putting me through it and testing me, and is doing so because He knows that I can take it. Remembering this in itself is empowering and takes about a 100 pounds off of my already small shoulders. I find myself feeling guilty for not remembering that Allah (swt) is always there-- I just need to turn to Him.


So the next time stress meets you, look it in the face and remember that you can take it. It might be hard, but it passes, because "verily, after hardship is ease", and the Promise of Allah (swt) is not broken. Chins up!

The Discovery of Insulin

Brief History on the Discovery of Insulin

I really cannot get over how relatively recent the discovery and manufacturing of insulin took place. January 11, 1922?! And before that, a diagnosis meant that the patient would live for only up to a year. And with that, they would have significant complications to deal with, and often times the patients ending up in a diabetic coma. Many of the patients were children, since type 1 meant no insulin, leaving diet and exercise as not much a help.

Another thing I found interesting was the speed at which the research moved. In only 20 weeks, the scientists moved from injected insulin into a dog to injecting humans with insulin.

On a personal note, it's an amazing thing to read that if I were born less than a hundred years ago, I might have died a year after diagnosis. Learning about the discovery of insulin story really puts appreciation under a bright light for me. Now diabetes can be controlled by taking a few painless injections, and even that has become more and more comfortable in my 8 years since diagnosis. Medical research is moving at lightening speed and with that fast pace, it becomes important to realize that all of it needs to be appreciated on a day to day, injection to injection, pill to pill, operation to operation basis. It is all an infinite blessing.

But then again, to put this in perspective - we don't know how many times a day a healthy person is being protected by Allah (swt) and allowed to live another day.

Performer gets third ear for art - BBC Health News

An Australian performer who has had an ear grafted onto his forearm in the name of art has sparked controversy.

The ear was created in the lab from cells

Cyprus-born Stelios Arcadiou, known as Stelarc, says his extra ear, made of human cartilage, is an augmentation of the body's form.

But surgeons questioned whether such an operation should have been carried out, given the absence of clinical need.

A patient who had similar surgery to correct a birth defect said she found the artist's work offensive.

He views this as art but I personally find it offensive Sasha Gardner, who was born with one ear missing

Stelarc, aged 61, said it had taken him years to find a surgeon prepared to perform the operation.

The ear does not function, but he hopes to have a microphone implanted to allow others to listen to what his extra ear picks up.

He presented his work to a UK audience at Newcastle's Centre for Life.

Art?

Reality TV star and model Sasha Gardner was born with one ear missing and recently took the first steps to have plastic surgery to rebuild the ear.

She said: "He views this as art but I personally find it offensive. It is a very sensitive subject for a lot of people.

"This is not something people should be using as an expression of art. It shows a lack of understanding."

Mr Francis Wells is a surgeon at Papworth Hospital who has helped an artist make a map of "The Sonic Body", by revealing its sounds, from veins to organs and muscles.

He said: "This will provoke a reaction. I would not condemn him for it, but it could cause some people distress.

"There are a lot of people who have lost an ear in an accident who cannot easily have that ear replaced. This type of reconstruction is expensive."

Mr David Gault, consultant plastic surgeon and member of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, said surgery is normally performed for obvious clinical or psychological benefit.

"Patients have had ears moved onto the forearm and then grafted on to the head before, so this is not something that is technically new.

"It is also possible that the publicity will do some good - if it prompts patients who are missing an ear to seek help that they had not realised was available."

--------

Not gonna lie, that's pretty strange.

Needed a place to share all this interesting stuff

I needed a place to put all of these things I find online - news articles, blog entries, random websites, definitions - all of it! Hope you enjoy it and find something that's interesting to you, too.

Blood Vessels Grown From Patient’s Skin - New York Times

Blood Vessels Grown From Patient’s Skin

Cytograft

Potential Blood vessels from skin may help patients whose vessels are damaged and children whose vessels need to grow along with them.

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

Published: October 9, 2007

From a snippet of a patient’s skin, researchers have grown blood vessels in a laboratory and then implanted them to restore blood flow around the patient’s damaged arteries and veins.

Engineering a Blood Vessel

Cytograft

It is the first time blood vessels created entirely from a patient’s own tissues have been used for this purpose, the researchers report in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Cytograft Tissue Engineering of Novato, Calif., made the vessels, in a process that takes six to nine months. Because they are derived from patients’ own cells, they eliminate the need for antirejection drugs. And because they are devoid of any synthetic materials or a scaffolding, they avoid complications from inflammatory reactions.

Doctors in Argentina have performed the first human tests of the vessels on six patients, the team reported. Two additional implants have been performed since the report was submitted, said Dr. Todd N. McAllister of Cytograft.

The longest follow-up among these patients has been for 13 months. Cytograft says the vessels hold promise for patients with damaged blood vessels from diabetes, arteriosclerosis, birth defects and other problems. But monitoring for a much longer period will be needed before those uses could become standard, the team said.

“This technique has a big potential in the vascular surgical field,” said Dr. Toshiharu Shinoka, who directs pediatric cardiovascular surgery at Yale and who plans to conduct studies with Cytograft on the new vessel. He called the technique an advance over one he used in operations on children in Japan, in which vessels were grown from cells on a scaffold that then degraded and was absorbed into the body.

Doctors not connected with the company agreed on the importance of the new technique. “A potential benefit may be for infants and children with congenital heart defects,” said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco. Unlike grafts from cadavers, he added, “the Cytograft vessels should be able to grow as the child does.”

The Cytograft studies were done at a leading cardiovascular center in Argentina, where medical costs are much lower than in the United States. The patients were all receiving chronic kidney dialysis, which cleanses wastes from the blood.

As is standard for such treatment, doctors had surgically cut an artery and a vein in the forearm and joined them in a link known as a shunt, which provides access for the repeated needle punctures needed to connect a patient to a dialysis machine. Such shunts can last up to 15 years. But when clots and infections develop in the shunts to reduce or stop blood flow, new ones must be created.

Dr. Sergio A. Garrido, a vascular surgeon in Buenos Aires, said he implanted the Cytograft vessels in the forearm or upper arm under general anesthesia, in a different area from the malfunctioning shunt. The procedure took 60 to 90 minutes. Through surgical gloves, the Cytograft vessel, 5 ½ to 11 ¾ inches long, felt a little more delicate than a regular vein, he said.

Volunteers were chosen for the study because of their need and because the shunts allowed an easy way to monitor the functioning of the new vessels. The doctors performed ultrasound tests three times a week and could repeatedly puncture the vessels for dialysis.

Vessels in the arm would be much easier to repair in an emergency than vessels implanted deeper in the body. In one potential use of the technique, the team hopes to use the vessels to save the toes and lower legs of people with poor blood circulation from arteries damaged by diabetes and arteriosclerosis. A second potential use is among people who need coronary bypasses. Cytograft is recruiting patients for those procedures in Poland and Slovakia.

A third potential use is pediatric, for children with some congenital heart birth defects. Cytograft plans to work with Dr. Shinoka to start those studies in another two years.

The skin biopsy takes about 15 minutes. Under local anesthesia, a doctor removes a piece of skin, including a strip of vein about an inch long, from the back of the hand or inner wrist. Then technicians use enzymes to extract fibroblast cells from the skin and endothelial cells from the inner lining of the vein. The cells are grown by the millions as sheets in a laboratory. The fibroblasts provide a mechanical backbone for the sheets that are peeled and rolled into a tube.

Although the vessel resembles a vein under the microscope, it has the mechanical strength of an artery, Dr. McAllister said. The technique allows the body over time to remodel the cells from a vein into a vessel with the elasticity of an artery.

Because of limitations in the length of the vessels that can be grown in the laboratory, Dr. McAllister said, his team sews shorter segments to create a longer one. The team plans to create a two-foot-long graft from four shorter ones for lower-limb grafts to be performed on patients in Argentina and Slovakia this year.

Dr. McAllister estimated that the cost of treating a patient now would be $15,000 to $25,000 but added that the price would be likely to fall with wider use.

The Cytograft team plans to publish a full report of the findings from its trial after 10 patients have been monitored for six months. Cytograft has applied to the Food and Drug Administration for approval to conduct tests of the vessels in the United States.

Taken from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/health/09vess.html?em&ex=1192075200&en=01a4c86f265910fd&ei=5087%0A#