Marty the Red Blood Cell’s Journey A Tour of What’s Inside of You!
Written by Kelly Brofka Illustrated by Michael Bernabei
About This book was written by Kelly Brofka a Social Inequalities student. The illustrations were done by Michael Bernabei an Introducation to Design student. This book was completed in the Spring of 2015 and used the Chalkduster and Oriya MB font for the text. The illustrations in the book were drawn in color pencil.
Hello, my name is Marty. I am a red blood cell. That means that I live inside of you. You know that stuff in the air that you breathe in? That’s called oxygen, and it is my job to bring it everywhere inside of you. Come on my tour and I will show you around the inside of you.
When you breathe in, the air goes through your nose and into a tube that goes to your lungs. They look like 2 inflated balloons that get bigger and smaller. The lungs try to get rid of the bad stuff in the air so that only the good oxygen will stay in your body.
After the good air is left in the lungs, my job starts. I grab on to the good air and start taking it on the journey to other parts of the body. Here we go to our first destination.
Our first stop is at the heart. On Valentine’s Day, you see lots of hearts. That really isn’t what it looks like. Instead, it is about the size of your fist. The heart is my best friend. Its walls are super strong. It squeezes and then relaxes, and this gives me the push to be pumped all over the body. Without the heart, none of the needed good air would be able to reach the different parts of the body.
One of the parts that heart helps me move to is the brain. Do you remember what your favorite toy looks like? Do you ever have dreams at night? Your brain takes care of all of these things without you even knowing it! The brain my boss and the boss for the rest of the body because it tells everything what to do and when to do it, even when you are asleep.
As we move around the inside of your body, I am not just floating around without help or direction. I get to move around by the blood vessels. They are little tubes that connect all the parts of the body. It is like a waterslide, but I am floating a liquid called blood, that is made up of water and lots of other important things for our body.
Do you like to eat food and then wonder where it goes? Our next stop is the stomach. Your stomach is right above your belly button, and it looks like a bag. It is very strong and has lots of layers, just like you during the winter. When food gets to the stomach, it acts like a blender. It mixes and chops the food up into much smaller pieces and carries it to other places so the healthy stuff can stay in our body.
The final stop on the journey are the kidneys. The kidneys are very important, you even have two of them! They are on your back, by your hips. You know when you get really dirty and need a bath? The blood that I travel in gets dirty too. The kidneys are where the blood gets cleaned. The waste that is in the blood gets taken out here so that the blood can be clean and keep moving.
Now that we have travelled all over the body, I gave everyone all of my good air. There are lots of other places I travel to also, but I don’t have enough time since there are so many. Well, now I need to go back where I started to get more good air with oxygen and start the journey all over again. I am constantly on the move, and all of this lets you be YOU.