The Beat Goes On

Illustration by Micheal DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

Because of heart disease in my family, I recently had to undergo a battery of cardio testing. There was the ECG, the stress test, and the cardio imaging test. For the final test, I was placed on my side and ultrasound machine took pictures of my heart at work. I was able to see the screen from where I lay, its vivid reds, greens, and blues reminding of a tracking weather radar. I could see it beating and the blood moving through the auricles, ventricles, and through the valves. 

One valve (I have no idea which one, but it looks like it’s set on a hinge and flaps up and down) looked incredibly, almost impossibly thin. I couldn’t help wondering how such a thin and seemingly fragile piece of flesh has been working non-stop twenty-four seven for the past sixty-seven years. I looked it up online and learned that a normal mitral valve is only three to five millimeters thick, about the same thickness as a credit card. I know heart cells are replaced every four and one-half years, but even so, seeing this device for myself was a little frightening. If this little valve stuck, fell off, or broke, I would probably die. 

And then, lying there on the bed watching my heart work, I started thinking about all the other remarkable and finely tuned equipment in our bodies, the gear most of us get as standard equipment. The eardrum is only about one-tenth of a millimeter thick, yet this tiny membrane allows us to experience speech, music, and the sound of falling rain. The cornea is also about that size—through it we see the world. 

And the nervous system which wires everything together is another miracle of engineering. Thoughts, actions, reactions, and sensation constantly travel along these ultra-thin (ten micrometers) highways. All this is going on right beneath our noses and has been all our lives. The intricacies of ambulation, recognition, thought, memory, and consciousness and how they relate to this marvel of biological engineering fashioned through thousands of years of evolution is mind-boggling. And there are billions of these marvelous machines wandering the earth, each unique from any other. Each one of us experiences life their own way, viewed through the prisms of their own body.

And then, I considered, still watching my beating heart on the screen next to me, are the other forms of all around us. Dogs, cats, mice, honeybees, bacteria, and trees all inhabit temples as fragile as ours—some not nearly as long-lived as us, but others, like the giant redwoods, that have existed thousands of years.

Two millimeters between me and the abyss. One millimeter between light and dark, sound and silence, between motion and stillness. We live our lives dancing on the narrowest of margins, mostly taking the miracles of our bodies for granted—and unthinkingly destroying these marvelous engines of life. 

Killing is an instinct for some species; it is a necessity. The destruction of its wonderful creations is part of the natural cycle. The fox eats the rabbit, the lion eats the gazelle, and the cougar eats the deer. We, the human race, eat just about everything we can get our hands on. 

As I watched the tiny valve flap back and forth, I thought of how easy it would be to destroy it and then reflected on how much time and energy mankind has spent devising new and innovative ways to destroy each other. Knives, clubs, swords, poison, guns, and now cars, to name only a few, some of the more traditional tools we use to rend and destroy each other’s flesh. But these are the tools of amateurs. The professionals, the military, have designed weapons of such destructive power that they can annihilate the entire planet. The atomic bomb, the neutron bomb, nerve gas, and the gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz are testimony to our steadfast dedication to the destruction of our own species. 

It’s one thing to kill in order to eat. A shark doesn’t kill a seal out of hatred or spite or envy or jealousy—or because he’s angry and has an adapted semi-automatic weapon; she does it to survive. Other than some species of ants, humans are the only species that kills its own members.

Now we are killing the entire planet. We actually have been working at if for years, but now it seems as if our efforts are finally paying off. It’s remarkable that the delicate ecological balance interweaving all species has held up as well as it has. But now the coral reefs are dying, the rainforests are disappearing, and species extinction is greater now than it ever has been. So far, the earth has been resilient, adapting to whatever mankind can throw at it, but it’s gotten to a point where it can’t keep up anymore. The planet is slowly dying.

The imaging of my heart rotated through side, frontal, and ventral views. I watched as it kept pumping merrily along, as determined and as mindless as the tide. I was again amazed at the doggedness of this little machine, no bigger than my fist. Its mechanics might be fragile, but life is determined. Although our individual vessels will age and deteriorate and we will eventually pass, we will live on in our descendants. 

A fraction of a millimeter may be all that keeps us alive and kicking, but the awareness of the engineering miracles inside our bodies is taken for granted by most of us. We go to work, we play, we give and we take without even thinking about the engine that allows us to do all this. We don’t worry about our bodies until we have to, just as we don’t worry about our cars until they break down. 

We not only owe it to ourselves, but we owe it to our planet, the world, and all the inhabitants on it to first appreciate and then protect the fragility of our lives and the ecological networks that connect us all. 

Take a look into your heart.