What goes around comes around.

NERVOUS SYSTEMS

From: Hypothalamus@fielding.com
To: Pancreas@fielding.com
    What are you guys playing at down there?  We've decided to curtail your supply potential.  You want anymore, you ask.  No more of this opening up the taps and letting it flow like water.  I warned the toes, the eyes, and the mouth that things are going to get rough for a while till you get your act together and take it easy with the insulin.  That stuff is difficult to make, 51 amino acids in two cross-linked chains, the building blocks of protein, it doesn't grow on trees, you know.  Just watch what you're doing, or we'll update again.
From: pancreas@fielding.com
To: hypothalamus@fielding.com
  We got your message pal, but let me tell you, a lot of things are going to go downhill fast if you don't loosen up some.  First of all, this guy's going to become a human syphon, a conduit, a water pipe, with a never ending supply of water at one end to help keep him from getting a dry mouth, and one  continual trip to the bathroom, morning, noon and night at the other.    He needs his moisture, you turn off the insulin and he's going to burn up in a fever.  He's not that old.  Give him a break.  He behaves himself these days, eats plenty of food with a low glycemic index, plenty of pasta, beans, lentils and fruit, all the foods that have a slow, prolonged effect on raising the blood sugar level.  He leaves out the other stuff,  alcohol, fatty food, and sugar, and this is how we repay him.  Look around you, most guys his age have got a girth like the Equator, a drinking habit that plays havoc with their liver, and a lot of them are still smoking cigarettes.  This guy's given all that stuff up, and this is how we treat him.  Come on, have a heart.
From: lungs@fielding.com
To: cerebral.cortex@fielding.com
  Hello up there.  I know you haven't heard from the two of us for a long time, but we're still down here doing our job as per normal, except these days it's better than normal.  Somebody up in the auditory cortex got him to listen to somebody giving out good advice, and now things are looking up down here.  We were all but getting near packing everything in, I mean, the place had become so filthy, there was so much tar about.  I'll grant you it was low-grade tar, but that stuff is pernicious.  It was getting like the state of Texas down here, all we needed were derricks, and we would have been in business.
  These days the place is so clean.  Give the guy a break, will you.  You go and make him give up sweet things like chocolate and ice cream, and he'll take up his old habits, and before you know it we'll be back finding it difficult to give this guy the oxygen he needs to stay alive.

From: hypothalamus@fielding.com
To: Pancreas@fielding.com
Cc: lungs@fielding.com
       Cerebral.cortex@fielding.com
  Now hear this.  The failure of the pancreas to produce insulin, thereby leading to high blood sugar, known in the trade as hyperglycaemia, and altered fat and protein metabolism, is not entirely due to things going wrong, but is actually a milder form of the disease known as diabetes, which can occur naturally in men of his age.  It has more to do with the double helix than with anything we can do.  He's a bit overweight, the auditory cortex recorded as much the last time he went to see a doctor, but we all know he has it in his own hands to keep his diabetes in check and live a normal life.  If he takes regular exercise,  and watches what he eats and drinks, he'll be able to get his blood sugar  back to acceptable levels so that his toes, eyes and saliva glands will operate properly again.  He won't have to drink so much water as he does at the moment, and he won't have to visit the bathroom quite so often as he does now.  Things aren't as black as you tried to paint them, and with all your help we'll get him to a ripe old age, and let him live a good life.  As for beer and cigarettes, who needs them?
2
From: cerebral.cortex@fielding.com
To: hypothalmus@fielding.com
Cc: pancreas@fielding.com
       Lungs@fielding.com
A funny thing happened just now when I started to write this message.  I accidentally double clicked on cerebral.cortex@fielding.com and guess what happened, the machine threw up a page for me to write my message on, and it was addressed to myself.  It had my own email address up there where it says, 'To:'.
  That made me think, and I came close to a sort of identity crisis.  Who am I?  I'm nobody, that's who.  I mean, here we are corresponding with each other, and talking about this guy as if he's some guy out there who we all know, when all the time, he's us, we're him.  Who is he, if he isn't us?  Who are we, if we aren't him?  The cerebral cortex has his thoughts, his ideas, his language,  his sense of touch and his hearing.  Our next door neighbours, the guys in forebrain, process his intellectual ideas.  Parts of his temporal lobe deal with his memory.  Those guys down at Grand Central Station, the thalamus to the rest of the world, handle all his sensory perceptions, conscious and unconscious.  His hypothalamus and pituitary gland get to handle his emotions and his sexual urges.  The functional parts down below, the stomach, intestines, bowels, all that stuff, that get him to move around, breathe, eat, defecate, urinate and all that other stuff we'd just as soon forget up here in the higher planes of his mind, all those parts are him.
  He isn't a third party or anything.  He isn't an independent being with his own existence.  He is us.  We are him, so let's stop talking about ourselves in the third person.  Let's take responsibility for our actions, which is what we've always done, I suppose, it's just we've never thought of it in that way before.
  I'm even using the word thought, as if it's something independent from what we do.  Take you guys down in pancreas; you get so insular sometimes.  It's like you really are an island, creating the stuff that drives cerebral cortex to make him do strange things.  You produce enough insulin, and we're fine up here.  You start acting up, your islets of whatever they're called, stop functioning  and what happens?  I'll tell you.  There are repercussions everywhere.  Cerebral cortex goes bananas, and before you can say Diabetic Marmalade, he's offending people, shouting at his workmates, upsetting his wife, kicking the cat, everything he's never done in his life before.
  His self-esteem drops, unpleasant thoughts develop, and thalamus and cortex are more or less powerless to stop it.
  Now though, he's got himself...what am I saying…we've got ourselves under control, taking a tablet every morning, and everything down below and up this end is Hunky Dory.  We're relaxed again, we're sociable, we're talkative, friendly, hard-working, fun-loving, attentive to our wife, in fact all the stuff we were beginning to lose as the insulin got scarcer and scarcer, and the blood sugar levels got higher and higher.
  A word to the pancreas, by the way.  Please don't get ideas above your station over this message.  You are indispensable, right enough, but so are the rest of us.  Medical science, which, by the way, is only a product of gray matter anyway, will soon find out how to by-pass you organs, except perhaps heart and lungs, but it will never replace cerebral cortex and the rest of us inside Cranium Cavern.  Sure, we've got computers and stuff, but they're pale imitations of the real thing, let me tell you.