Motion

August 29, 2007

When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something,' moving, exchanging material with its environment" -- Erwin Schrodinger

Of the four tenets of osteopathic medicine, perhaps the most well-known is the inter-relationship between the structure and function of the human body. The structure of something -- whether the vertebrae of the spine, the dome of the diaphragm, or even the contour of the fibro-cellular matrix -- reveals the ideal function, and likewise the function determines the structure. When one has been infected with pathology, so too must the other follow. And so to treat the one will undoubtedly improve the other.  

I once had an English teacher in high school who, perhaps because of her exceptionally high expectations of us, remains in my mind one of the best educators I have ever had the privilege to study under. She used to make the point that the form an author chose to write in revealed something about the content he was writing about. The fact that something was a poem in meter may be as important as the poem's content itself.  

Of infinitely more importance (while at the same time using identical logic), I once knew a priest who drew this conclusion: that what Jesus said pales in comparison to the fact that he was saying it at all in the first place.  

And so this last month has been very difficult for me, as I have been working in a dedicated trauma intensive care unit (TICU). Because there we take care of people who have lost all ability to move, to function within their environment, and to do anything whatsoever that we might call living.  

When you take care of people like this, it is easy (although I believe dangerous) to de-humanize them. One individual sticks out in my mind. He had gotten into a fight with his girlfriend, had a drink or two, and then crashed his motorcycle into a tree. He suffered serious brain injury, a collapsed lung, and numerous facial fractures. He acquired an infection, and was fighting the consequences of septic shock. He was dying. And to us, for just a moment, he became a lot of work. His ventilator settings were complicated, and his oxygenation status simply wasn't cooperating. He was so bloated with fluids that trying to insert lines or chest tubes in him was horribly difficult. And we hadn't even gotten to his brain injuries.  

And then his mother came in. She cried the sort of hysterical crying that makes you pray your own mother will never do. She collapsed on the floor, stood up, and collapsed again, this time on top of her comatose son. When we told her there was nothing we could do, the sad pain in her eyes brought tears to my own.  

The relationship that she had with her son in that TICU, even though it was short, brought meaning to both their lives. It was obvious to all of us how much this young man meant to his mother: the love that she has for him brought meaning to him. There was a kind of motion there -- not a typical, mechanical kind, but rather a kind built upon emotions. The structure and function of the situation was somehow apparent. There was something indeed exchanging between the two of them, and they were both, at that moment, very much alive.