Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Have you stopped recently to think about just one small part of the marvelous way we're made?

I recently learned about a "swallow study" or "cookie test" when a loved one was having some difficulty swallowing during a recent hospital stay. A "cookie test" sounds like a great test, at least as hospital tests go.

And it was. It basically consisted of being fed various items of different consistencies (none with a major yuck factor): water, thickened tea (that was the grossest of the lot), pudding, fruit cocktail with juice, and finally, yes, a cookie. And oh yeah, this was all laced with barium so it would show up on an X-ray.

The fascinating thing was that the speech pathologist and radiologist produced a videotape X-ray of the whole thing, so that even though we weren't allowed to actually be in the room during the test, we could watch the tape afterwards, complete with a play-by-play description by the pathologist. The technical name for this is a videofluorscopy and it is useful in evaluating how food moves from the mouth to the esophagus. A doctor usually asks for this study to evaluate specific swallowing problems.

I'm sure the test was ridiculously expensive but we did learn a lot of perhaps potentially life-saving information for future use. It also helped us understand the excruciatingly slow chewing of our loved one.

One website described the process of swallowing this way: "Some 50 pairs of muscles and many nerves work to move food from the mouth to the stomach. This happens in three stages. First, the tongue moves the food around in the mouth for chewing. Chewing makes the food the right size to swallow and helps mix the food with saliva. Saliva softens and moistens the food to make swallowing easier. During this first stage, the tongue collects the prepared food or liquid, making it ready for swallowing.

"The second stage begins when the tongue pushes the food or liquid to the back of the mouth, which triggers a swallowing reflex that passes the food through the pharynx (the canal that connects the mouth with the esophagus). During this stage, the larynx (voice box) closes tightly and breathing stops to prevent food or liquid from entering the lungs.

"The third stage begins when food or liquid enters the esophagus, the canal that carries food and liquid to the stomach. This passage through the esophagus usually occurs in about 3 seconds, depending on the texture or consistency of the food."(The website of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders from the National Institutes of Health http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/dysph.htm#2 )

To put it in non-technical language, the best way I could describe the action was that it looked like a well-oiled steam shovel moving inside your mouth.

Most of this activity happens without conscious attention on our part. The pathologist said our brains and nerves control the chewing activity, and we can, of course, stop it or start it at will, but the swallowing reflex and the closing off of the windpipe are totally involuntary.

This is just one tiny fraction of the marvelous way our whole body is put together! When it works, it is about 1000 miracles (wild guess) all functioning together. Of course, the older we get, the more these well-oiled parts slow down and break down.

Think about your activity just now: reading words on a page or computer screen- and how your eyes convert the image of the word to a picture (upside down, if I recall correctly) in the back of your eyes, which travels to your brain where your learned skill of recognizing how words are put together converts the word to a thought which your brain processes. I'm dizzy just thinking about it.

The Psalmist declared, "Behold, I am fearfully and wonderfully made." What a machine we've been given! Did it just happen? Not in my book.

If you're interested, there is more information about:
The most important event of all time and
The most important Book of all time.

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Contributed by Melodie Davis: MelodieD@MennoMedia.org Melodie is the author of eight books and writes a syndicated newspaper column, Another Way