The Healing Hand

When I was a kid, I had multiple opportunities to see the miracle of God’s design for the human body in the way it heals itself.  I was one of those kids with constant scabs on my knees. If I wasn’t running over a rock and crashing my bike on a woodsy trail in summer, I was slipping and sliding on a sled down a snow covered hill in winter until I chipped a tooth on the sled rail. Can’t explain it, but it happened. Twice.  I was not a particularly observant child, oblivious to the why or how. I kept falling down and feeling the pain of my injuries, slapping on a Band-Aid and getting back on the bike or sled. 

Recently I sliced a finger on a very sharp blade, and the wound required stitches to help it heal. I watched the doc do her thing at Urgent Care at Kaiser on Stockdale Hwy (observation: don’t go there unless you really, really need it. Its crowded! And they hide all the best docs there, I think.)  Afterward, I went home, bandaged and instructed in the care of my wound. 

Watching the wound heal has been a great reminder of something I take for granted: God’s design of my body to knit itself back together. At the risk of being a bit too graphic, I need to tell you that when I sustained the injury, I was really worried I might lose the sense of touch in this important right hand finger. The tip of my finger was white from the cut over the top of my finger and down the nail and I feared that blood supply was too damaged, which I assumed might also mean nerves were cut. I worried about function. Writing is a doable challenge with a damaged digit, but hand stitching and painting were going to be a major challenge without a sense of touch.  At first the entire end of my finger felt numb.  Then as the days passed, small pain sensations reassured me that the nerves were mending, maybe even sending out test signals?  And 15 days out I am seeing new skin being revealed as the wound has closed and repaired itself.  Who did that?  I mean, the wound was certainly my doing, but the healing? Who decides when blood will clot and when it won’t?  And what’s happening in there under that bandage anyway? 

I had to: I Googled it. (you can learn so much on the internet!)  And here is what I found:
When an injury occurs, the first thing that happens is vasoconstriction — blood vessels leading to the wound tighten to reduce the flow of blood to the injured area. Neat, huh? Then platelets

rush to the scene. These sticky blood cells clump to each other and then adhere to the sides of the torn blood vessel, making a plug. Then clotting proteins in the blood join forces to form a fibrin net that holds the platelet plug in place over the cut, and in just a few seconds or minutes (depending on how bad the scrape is), bleeding stops, thanks to coagulation! The fibrin plug becomes a scab that will eventually fall off or be reabsorbed into the body once healing is complete.

What an amazing design! A great plan, and certainly not something I would have come up with. But there’s more! Once bleeding has been controlled, the next step is stopping infection. The blood vessels that were constricted now dilate to bring white blood cells rushing to the scene. White blood cells engulf and destroy any germs that may have gotten into the body through the open wound.

When the enemies of blood loss and infection have been defeated, the body turns its attention to healing and rebuilding: Fibroblasts (cells that are capable of forming skin and other tissue) gather at the site of injury and begin to produce collagen, which will eventually fill in the wound under the scab and create new capillaries to bring oxygen-rich blood to the recovering wound. Wow! New paths for blood. There’s my answer to the worry about my finger tip healing. God had it covered all along. Skin along the edges of the wound becomes thicker and then gradually migrates (or stretches) under the scab to the center of the wound, where it meets skin from the other side and forms a scar about three weeks after the initial injury.

Puhleeze don’t tell me that a bazillion cells collided somewhere in space and just started doing all this.  This is incredibly intelligent design, and God’s method of providing care for His creation. The icing on the cake is that He gave us the smarts to figure this out so medical science can step in and assist when we mess things up too much, like I did.

So the next time you get a scrape or cut, sustain an injury, or help your child with his latest boo boo, remember the God who made us, his wonderful creations, and the plans he has made for our care.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.  Psalm 139:13-14