More news from the home front
Do parents take courses on how to drive their children crazy??
The same day I arrived home, I bought Mom a bouquet of flowers as a belated Mother's Day thing. Does she say "Thank you"? Noooo, she asks how much they cost! I was like, "Mom, I'm not going to tell you - they're a gift!"
Then Dad said I'm now twice Mom's size, and Mom chipped in saying that if I grow any fatter, I'll look like a balloon. Talk about exaggeration - yes, I HAVE put on a bit of weight, but I'm nowhere near round, I'll have you know! *steam coming out of ears*
Throughout the whole time I was there, Dad was continually placing medical journals under my nose, saying, "Read this!" So I have read about older people & aerobics, our body's metabolism, gum disease, the "obesity gene", and fat cells, among other things. I now know that fat cells never go away, they just go flat. If you eat too much, they fill up, and then a signal tells the body to make more fat cells. Which go flat when you lose weight, but simply sit there, ready to fill up again at the slightest provocation. Scary thought, no?
Also, there's a gene, called ob, which produces a "satiety hormone", leptin (which means "slender" in Greek). This hormone tells your brain when your stomach gets full, which prompts you to stop eating. Interesting, isn't it? Obese people have been found to have high levels of the hormone, so there's some speculation that they might be resistant to it - just as some diabetics are insulin-resistant.
Oh, and I learnt that about the colour of my eye's pupil.
Turns out the pupil is actually the opening in the eyeball for light rays to pass through. (Some deficiency in my education had caused me to miss this very important fact.) In that case, I said to Dad, "You mean the inside of my eye is black?!"
He asked me what colour I'd have expected the inside of my eye to be, and I said red, you know, just like the stomach is all red inside. (Dad performs gastroscopys, a procedure which involves inserting a fibre-optic tube through the mouth, down the throat and into the stomach to view the stomach lining. I've assisted him before and he's let me look through the viewer - I don't know how he tells what is what, it's all pink and red stuff to me!)
Dad said, "Well, it might be red, but do you think you have a light bulb in your eye? This pen [taking up a pen to demonstrate] might be red, but if I turn off the light, what red is there to see?!" Ohhh. So that's why my pupil is black! LOL