Video Reporting of Blood Cells - Essay Example

? Module Video reporting may be fun, but being in a sub 8 microns long is a different story all together. I knew it would be a great experience, but it was only when I was miniaturised that I began to realise it would be scary as well! At that size, even dust is no more small particles! The plan was simple; to get injected into the femoral vein and manoeuvre across a bit and then return back. I thought it would be all reddish inside the vein, it wasn’t. The red blood cells you see, were all separate from the plasma from my perspective. Flowing with the blood, colliding with the sub at times. They were rubbery though and didn’t damage the sub! I was going down the femoral vein when I was alerted about this invasion. White blood cells were all rushing downstream, squeezing and sliding between red blood cells. I was in luck, I began following them. Flowing with the blood was slow, so I started my engines and started following the white blood cells. It was difficult making way between all these cells. Platelets were particularly notorious, they would stick to the screen. So I had to be very careful not to bump into them. As I began to catch speed I moved first into the external iliac vein, and as I moved into the common iliac vein, it became spacious. The union of both common iliac veins was huge and there was a lot of turbulence there, slowly we went higher and higher into the body. Crossing by the liver was not a good experience, a lot of murky fluid entered the blood through the hepatic veins, I guess her liver is not working well enough. Or maybe, liver had also sensed the invasion and was creating more proteins! Well whatever it was, we managed to somehow get into the right atrium. The next thing I heard was a loud sound and we were in this chamber. It was turbulence all around, our sub nearly collided with the papillary muscles. This time there was a huge push and we were out of the right ventricle was well, just like that, in a split second! Pulmonary arteries were rather tense, we carefully drove into the right one, following all those white blood cells. Arteries began to narrow up now (Snell & Snell, 2008). . With every turn it was becoming more and more congested. And with all these white blood cells around, it looked scary! I mean, why would not they phagocytise us! They didn’t, God knows why but they didn’t! However they did take us deep into the lung, it was the lower lobe I guess, because the arteries were all going down. When we reached the capillaries, there was hardly any place to move. Even red blood cells were squeezing through them. We found a fenestration and jumped through it into an alveolus. It was like a spherical room. We took some time to breathe a little, and then moved into a bronchiole. It was all empty, just the sound of air whistling its way through the passages. We had lost our trail, there were no white blood cells around. So we decided to move up the airways and look for bacteria if we could. It was in a tertiary bronchus that we noticed some strange sound coming from somewhere, we followed the and in a secondary bronchus we landed straight on the site where the battle was going on! There were literally thousands of these small ball like bacteria, trying to eat into the walls of bronchus. White blood cells, rather neutrophils had also arrived and they were chasing bacteria trying to catch them and eat them. I noticed a few other white blood cells as well, probably they were B-lymphocytes and T-lymphocytes (Greaves, Owen & Raff 1973). They were maintaining some distance from the bacteria, only picking up chunks of dead bacteria and closely examining them. I also kept safe distance, our sub was no match for these bacteria! While I videoed these scenes, Neutrophils grew in number, they turned into a huge army and slowly cordoned off the whole area. The bacteria now only had one way to go, through the walls! They also seemed to realise this and sped up their eating process. However none had so far made it through the wall. With nowhere to run, the bacteria became easy prey. Each neutrophil had a number of bacteria in its podocytes, and they were swift as well. It took them like half an hour to get over with all those bacteria. They didn’t eat all of them, in fact most of the bacteria were just lying there dead. I guess it was some antibody that was working around as well! (Subramanian, 2004).  I so much wanted to go and congratulate the blood cells, but within my heart I was afraid; what if they identify me as a foreign particle. Having seen them in action we decided to slip away quietly. It was a lot for our first trip, so we decided to move up the airways! It was not the best of my decisions. The bronchi became more and slimier as we went into larger ones. We had to move at a very slow pace, sometimes with the aid of the cilia. But in a few hours we made to the trachea. I so much wanted to get out by now that I decided to irritate the trachea. I knew he would cough but it took a few tricks to make him do it. The movement he coughed, were propelled with all the mucus through the larynx and straight into the pharynx. While most of the mucus dispersed here and there, our sub went straight into the nasopharynx I could see light at the end of the tunnel here! We engaged our engines at full thrust and propelled our way into the nose. It was all creepy there, she had not cleaned it in years I guess. The good thing is, we didn’t had to stay there and we moved out of her nose. It was a sigh of relief. There were times when I thought I wouldn’t live to tell the tale, and now I had video evidence of so many awesome sights. They had told me it would be a new experience. No sir, it was a new age! References Top of Form Snell, R. S., & Snell, R. S. (2008). Clinical anatomy by regions. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Top of Form Greaves, M. F., Owen, J. J. T., & Raff, M. C. (1973). T and B lymphocytes: origins, properties and roles in immune responses. Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica. Top of Form Subramanian, G. (2004). Antibodies. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Bottom of Form Bottom of Form Bottom of Form Read More