As I sit with a cold bag of peas smooshed against the left cheek of my painfully windburned face (Northern Ireland’s coastlines are blustery af), I gasp in awe at the astoundingly graphic yet oddly fascinating scenes of ‘Surgeons – At The Edge Of Life’, a show guaranteed to have you on the edge of your seat grappling for the sick bucket I can assure you. From close-up camera angles highlighting the magnificent ability of the surgeons to intentionally stop a 3 year old child’s heart on the operating table in order to conduct surgery on the respiratory system, to the scenes of pneumatic drills screwing in metal rods vertically down the spinal cord of a 63 year old man. All I can say is it’ll put you right off your TV dinner and straight onto Google to investigate all types of weird questions about your very own body.
Mesmerised by every filmed intricate movement the hospital staff make in their efforts to save the lives of patients in life-threatening conditions to vastly improving the quality of life in others. To being in awe of the recovery and the adaptability to which the human body is capable of, I ask myself, are we all just bags of flesh and bone, or are we something more than that? Having a ‘personality’, the ability to empathize and rationalize, are these not qualities spared only for humanity or are we all just an experiment of evolution? Evolution going so far as to grant us with the brain to body ratio necessary to think logically and imaginatively and perhaps to think that there is more to us than maybe there really is?
What does it mean to be human?
The Neon Squid 