Doctor Daddy's Bedtime Story!

This is part of a conversation I'm currently having with people placed here so I don't have to tell it in person because it takes too long to tell.

When I was about four or five - back when we called him Doctor Daddy, not quite understanding why we called him Daddy while everyone else called him Doctor - my father told me a bedtime story that has stayed with me my whole life and which still remains my bedrock when making sense of any medical issue.  Also, and strangely, when I was engaged to Michael and mixing with world-leading Immunologists, thanks to this story I always knew exactly what they were talking about and was even able to hold my own in conversations with them merely by substituting the medical names for the Doctor Daddy names.  However, in my head I still use the Doctor Daddy names:


"Your body is full of soldiers that march around day and night, protecting your body from all danger and harm.  Everyone has soldiers but how many you have depends on what happens to you when you're a little child.  All those lucky little boys and girls who are allowed to play outdoors and get sick and dirty when they're young go through life with millions upon millions of soldiers, while poor sad little children who have to stay indoors and who have to stay clean and who aren't allowed to get sick because they have parents who disinfect everything, have to go through life with hardly any soldiers at all, so they don't have much to protect them and that is very, very, very sad and bad.

And what happens is that these soldiers constantly march through your body and stop everything that comes into it.  If it's something they haven't seen before, they surround it and hold it still and special soldiers measure it and draw up blueprints for what looks just like an Egyptian sarcophagus and those plans are kept back in their factories for the rest of your life.  And after the plans are finished, they let it go and then watch and wait to see what this new thing does.  

So after watching it pass through your body if they decide this new thing does no harm they say "Welcome back, friend" the next time they meet it and always let it go on its way.  But if they decide this new thing does do harm, all the soldiers race up to surround it and hold it while back at the factories they make a sarcophagi for each of these bad things and when they're made they capture the bad thing and throw it into the sarcophagi so it does no more harm as they race it through the body and throw it into the nearest drainage system.  Those drainage systems are pee or poo or mucus or sneezes or vomit or sweat or pus, which is why you must never never touch any of these things and why you must wash your hands after you even come anywhere near them.

However sometimes very very bad things come into your body; things which are so mean and aggressive they won't even let the soldiers stop them to measure them.  And that's when the battles begin.  Oh yes, all those soldiers go in to fight for you to the death and they force the bad thing to hold still while they take measurements for the sarcophagi so they can safely get it out of your body.

And when the battles are going on you can feel it because the site of the battle becomes all red and swollen and hot.  And quite often that site turns into a boil because your body tries to push the bad thing out as quickly as it can so picks the closest drainage system which is through the pores in your skin.

And that's what pus is: dead soldiers; soldiers who have given their life protecting you, so you must always treat pus respectfully and never touch it, but put it in a tissue and immediately flush it down the toilet.  Then you must wash your hands in case you have bad sarcophagi on them.

But then there are some very bad things come into your body that are very intelligent, and immediately they enter they quickly hide so the soldiers can't find them and while they're hidden they breed up into enormous armies, and when the bad army is enormous that's when they come out of hiding and your entire body goes into battle for you.  And when that war is happening, you always know it because you feel sick and feverish and hot and red, and the best thing you can do then is go to sleep so you stay out of the way while your soldiers do their work.

And that's why you have vaccinations:  when bad things are so very very bad that they're too much for your body to handle, what doctors do is they give you a scratch of a weakened form of this bad bad thing. They always make sure that your body only gets it with just enough life so your body knows that it's a dangerous bad thing but not so much life that the soldiers can't stop it and hold it and so get to make the measurements. And that way, when they meet the bad thing again, the factories go immediately into production for the sarcophagi and the soldiers don't have to battle so hard to get rid of it.

Now about those very important factories:  they're in a part of your body called "the bone marrow" and it is in this bone marrow that your body makes the soldiers which is why you must always eat lots of green leafy vegetables because that's how you can keep your factories strong.  But those factories are also very important because it's where they store the blueprints to make the sarcophagi, and once they have those blueprints they keep them safely for the rest of your life so they are always ready to make those coffins to throw the bad things into every time they turn up.

So now you know how brave and heroic your body is, you must treat it with a great deal of reverence and respect. And you also have to do your part by eating your vegetables because that's the food that feeds your factories and keeps them running at optimum capacity."


And that is Doctor Daddy's bedtime story.  Amazing, huh, AND the most useful story I've ever heard in my life. It's stood the test of time and the only new information I've had to add to it over the years is:

 1) Michael's co-discovery of T-cells ... which goes like this in my head "Lucky little boys and girls who are allowed to take a sickness from start to finish without idiot parents forcing them to take anti-biotics - meaning that the body isn't allowed to do the whole battle itself  - go through life with factories that are ready at any moment to churn out a special Commando Unit of special SAS type soldiers with extra special fighting skills every time they're needed to get rid of truly bad things.

2) Chemotherapy destroys the factories.  WTF is that about?  Right when you need those factories the most, western medicine destroys 'em.  I've often asked doctors what that's about and I've not yet ever got a satisfactory explanation.

3)  Other recent discoveries go like this in my head: your body also has oxy-torch-weilding soldiers that march around checking out your cells and any they don't like the look of they blast with their oxy-torches to melt them ...  and then a slug-looking-thing that follows them around then sucks up all that melted cell matter.