Reset

Needless to say, nephrologists talk a lot about the blood's salt or sodium content. We teach our medical students that kidneys help to keep our body's solute (composed primarily of sodium) concentration or so-called osmolality within a narrow range. No more, no less. It would be hard to imagine how nature works it out to keep everything in such a fine balance.

Now. Maybe you think our body is too unwieldy or rigid to operate only within a narrow range of osmolality. "Why," you might ask, "isn't life constructed to get along okay with a wider range of osmolality?" Ten points and a gold star if you ask this question. And it makes sense. It turns out that some people are doing perfectly fine after resetting their osmostat, and live happily ever after with a lower blood sodium concentration.

Speaking of reset osmostat, this concept is a gem of wisdom on the way to live our life. Which brings me to the story of resetting my thermostat. I remember how I shivered during each winter when I was a child. My mother used to say that I was the most "utterly lazy cold-blooded animal." I simply looked like a stationary lizard when the temperature plummeted. A lizard flicks the tongue out of its mouth only if necessary. And me too. I sat in front of my textbook with my hands buried in my pocket, and then turned the page using my lips.

My hibernating life cycle continued until my travel to Beijing during the university winter break. I was twenty, enthusiastic with my first ever trip on my own. It was that winter I first saw snow. That helped. More than anything else, resetting my thermostat after return from the snowy trip gave me the energy to wear less and less at winter. I soon went to spend one of the subsequent winters learning ski and dogsled across snow-covered lakes in a Outward Bound wilderness course in northern Minnesota.