Ouch. Snap. Son of a ……..

You fall on your hip, bang your shoulder, or rounding a desk, gouge your thigh. It causes bruising and annoyance. Exceedingly bad words spew from your mouth. Your body recovers from you not paying attention to where you are going in a methodical and predictable timeline. Your brain loves predicability, and that helps the healing process.

On the day of the incident, a bright reddish mark appears on the skin. Ugly, discolored bruise. Ow! Where you banged into that door jamb ruptures blood vessels and spills red blood cells. By day 2 or 3, the blood cells begin to degrade. Healing has begun in earnest. The bruise isn’t so vivid, and the area turns a dull bluish purple. Between day 4 and 6, the cells are broken down further because hemoglobin (red blood cells) is broken down into biliverdin, a green component in blood. Who knew we had green in our blood? Does that make a case for “blue bloods?” Maybe. Now the bruise is a yellowish green.

Right around a week, the bruise becomes a yellowish brown as the biliverdin degrades into bilirubin, a yellowish compound. What? Now we have green and yellow blood? By 10 to 12 days from dropping a package on your foot, the bruise becomes light brown. The bilirubin breaks down to hemosiderin, a yellow-brown pigment. Healing is progressing nicely.

It’s two weeks out from banging your knee on a table leg. Finally, the bruise fades. Your white blood cells (the immune system Big-Gun fighters) have removed all the red blood cell (hemoglobin) by-products. These, in turn, are sent to the lymph system, for body removal through your waste products, perspiration, and respiration.

Who cares about bruising and how your body heals normally? Well, you should. It’s your body. You should know what’s normal, and what’s not normal, for healing so you can stay mentally sharp, physically strong, and emotional stable. It isn’t a fluke that some people age better than others. They understand their bodies, and know when something isn’t normal for them. It isn’t that they do everything right. They don’t. They just do more right things than wrong things. You don’t need a lot of wins in life. You need a few big wins to compensate for all the failures.

That’s AgingIntelligently.