Ryan KingThese are my thoughts...

Mortality 03/06/10

Early today I received a call from my father. We haven’t talked in something like six months. Initially I was confused, I just assumed that he wanted to tell me that he was moving or ask me for something. Boy was I wrong. It turns out that he had a heart attack while he was at work. He was calling me from the hospital to let me know that he was having surgery tomorrow morning. He hasn’t exactly been a big part of my life, but he is my father so hearing that still hit me pretty hard. I have lost multiple family members to heart failure and I really don’t want to loose another, especially so soon.

This got me to thinking about my own mortality. Heart disease runs in my family, rampantly as a matter of fact. I try to take care of myself, I eat healthy and I try to stay active as much as I can (which is hard when you don’t know anyone to due stuff with). I manage to keep my blood pressure low even though my stress level is through the roof. Despite all of this I am still worried. What if I just have a defective heart and it is just a matter of time before it stops working? I was watching this program on the Discovery Channel the other night called The Human Body: Pushing the Limits. During it they talked about how the brain works to overcome starvation. Basically what happens is that the brain releases a hormone and in conjunction with the slowing of non-essential processes puts your body into a super efficiency mode. What scientists have found out is that if a person halves their regular caloric intake, the brain can be fooled into thinking that it is starving and stay in that super efficiency state. This can elongate a person’s life expectancy and significantly improve the health of the heart. This is something I have started to honestly think about doing myself in an attempt to keep my heart strong and healthy.

Now I am going to get all cliche on you, but it it is something to think about. No one knows when they are going to die until the reaper is knocking at the door. Tomorrow could be your last day to live, or even worse, you might not wake up to see tomorrow. I’m not going to say that you need to live every day to the fullest, because that is extremely hard to do. Instead I am going to say that you need to make sure that you happy and let the people that you love know you love them.