A more serious/pensive blog entry today...
Rachel Pearson and I went to see our childhood friend
Isa Stenzel this weekend (unfortunately
Ana, her identical twin, was not in attendance), who was in town with a
Cystic Fibrosis art
show. Both Isa and Ana
suffered
from Cystic Fibrosis for years, and a visit to their house after school
meant respiratory therapy first, play-time after. We were always
very aware that they, like most CS patients, would probably not live to
an old age with the illness. So I am absolutely thrilled that both are
doing very well after getting lung
transplants,
a miracle of modern medicine. It’s been a rough road, but Isa looks
fantastic, and the show and our reunion were very touching for me.
I was also fascinated with Isa’s transplant tale, which has had the
wheels in my head turning for days. She says that strangely, a few days
after the transplant, she began to hear Mexican music in her head, and
knew with clarity that her donor had been a Latino, something which
later turned out to be true. She also began having a strange urge to go
fishing, something she had never really done before. When she finally
met the family of her donor last week at their request, she asked them
if, by any chance, he had enjoyed fishing. Turns out he was an avid
fisherman.
Now, never having been sold on any unproven theory (I’m the daughter of
a scientist), but open to any possibility (I’m agnostic through and
through), stories like these are always intriguing to me. I wonder
whether this can be attributed to ESP, “spirits”, or some sort of
residual “memory” in the body’s tissue. The latter one is an
interesting hypothesis, as Isa explained that the nature of transplants
necessitates a healthy body, and therefore, most donors died of head
trauma, which means they died suddenly and unexpectedly. Could their
sudden deaths have left their body tissue with some sort of chemical
make-up that could be sensed by the brain? Do “spirits” really exist
when they aren’t ready to leave this world? Could the family members’
thoughts be picked up psychically by Isa? There is no scientific
explanation, yet I do not doubt Isa’s experience. She is in the
sciences herself, and has always been extremely honest and not prone to
flights of fancy. I pondered possible explanations on the way home, and
came to no decisive conclusion. But it does make me remember that there
are things we do not know, a humbling experience for an inquisitive
mind. It’s why I could never understand someone’s desire to study
philosophy: I would find it maddening to study questions to which you
already knew there were no decisive answers.
