The Miracle of Us
Back in medical school, I asked a friend how much he thought our understandings of ourselves were related to the actual physical bodies we inhabited. I was trying to get at the degree to which our uniquely physical selves shape our identity. The conversation was in the context of experiencing loss of function or ability—an amputation, a paralysis, a sensory impairment. How much about who we are as individuals relates to how we use our body as well as our mind? We didn’t make much headway on the theoretical question.
As years have passed, practical experience informs me. From athletic tomboy to pregnant woman, tired mother, hormonally challenged matriarch and stiff-jointed elder, I understand myself in part through the claims my body makes upon me. My favorite physical moments are those that seem timeless—when I am playing a great set of tennis, when I am hiking through a stunning landscape or when I close my eyes and soak in the sun on a sandy ocean beach. Those times defy a feeling of age and are just purely felt as me being myself in the world at large.
Our physical self is never the same two days in a row. It is always adapting to its environment, adding and losing cells in continuous turnover and becoming stronger or weaker in relation to external pressures. Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about how amazing it is that day after day, our body self-regulates to manage our life more efficiently and expertly than any engineering team could design.
This became vividly apparent to me in the past five weeks. On April 20, a friend and I entered the hospital together. We got wheeled to adjoining operating rooms and six hours later, my left kidney was snuggled into his lower abdomen. Within 24 hours, we both had healthy kidney function and walked the hospital hall together with broad smiles and swollen bellies.
Two became one. Perhaps not the way that is usually intended, but it resonates. I went from two kidneys to one, but my original pair ended up serving two bodies. Somehow, we are not so different from each other as individuals when it comes to life sustaining issues. Yes, we have our unique profiles, even our HLA identities that may preclude a transplant match. But mostly, our bodies are made as both one and many. We can share blood, organs, bone marrow and even babies in a womb.
That seems fit for a word like miraculous. I remember in medical school, even the most atheistic among us were awestruck by embryology. So many opportunities to go wrong, yet such a beautiful system that usually results in a whole new creation. Individual yet composed of generations of DNA from those before us.
I also remember my cadaver in gross anatomy lab. She looked so complete on the outside, but lots of parts were missing on the inside. Surgeries had taken her uterus, ovaries and appendix. Yet she was fully an elderly woman who lived a long life. The parts do not make the whole.
Those who have the patience to read what I write know that I am deeply intrigued by the Trinity. It satisfies my yearning to understand who we are as separate and yet inextricably joined with one another. If we are made in the image of God, then can’t that mean we are made in the image of the Trinity? One yet many? Our individuality precious and unique but also a life giving member of a wider creation?
These are the things I think about. Meanwhile, my solo kidney does its job. It now takes on the challenge left by its spare. It doesn’t make a fuss, really. Neither do my wounds. They are healing, right according to plan, without any human intervention beyond a little super glue on the incision line. And my friend’s pre-owned kidney has erased 25 years of chronic disease from his life. We are designed to heal. Miraculous.
It has taken me weeks to write anything, because I resist the common response of—you are heroic! Courageous! Amazing! I feel really awkward when I hear that, and I better understand why, now. We are so linked together, and it is about so much more than one choice I made. It is about the researchers and the surgeons and the people willing to risk being first. It is about the meal trains and the prayers and the anointing with oil we both received. It is about my husband’s deep caregiving and my family’s acceptance of risk. It is about my incredibly good fortune to have a healthy body and a way to keep it that way. It is about the new ways I have experienced love and compassion and dependence on others.
We are one and many. Physically and spiritually. Incredible to ponder. The miracle of us.