Cells at Work!

The chapter opens with a flourish of trumpets, followed by the sound of blood rushing through the lungs. It's the beginning of the chapter's theme, "crack, crack, crack" . The narrator tells us that this is the land of the brave, and he thanks the white blood cell for saving his life. The white blood cells, he says, are like a fresh start in life, and they're happy to be back in the real world. He thanks the neutrophils, who make up half of all the blood in the world. The neutrophils give him the blood count, and the narrator thanks the sunnin cell, which gives him the count of the rest of the body. He's grateful that he's saved his life, too, and thanks the blood cells for saving him, too. He asks the white cells to hurry up to the lungs, where they'll have to deal with the spleen, which is also a lymph duct. The spleen is a place where dead and dying cells are collected, and it's where the immune system is supposed to be working. White blood cells are shocked to find that the lungs are in trouble, because there's a nasty disease called pneumonia, which can lead to infection. They're also shocked to learn that pneumonia is caused by pneumo-coccus, a kind of infection that's caused by a single cell in the lungs infecting all the other cells. The immune system can't get rid of the infection, so the infection escapes into the blood stream . It turns out that pneumonia can also lead to bacterial meningitis, a dangerous disease caused by an infection in the brain. The White Blood Cells scurry off to the dendritic cells, which are immune cells that take in infected cells and present them to other immune cells . Finally, they get to the platelet, which collects blood clots that are stuck in the walls of a blood vessel. The blood clot is a sticky clump of blood, which the White Blood Cell has been stuck in for a long time. The platelets are supposed to keep the blood flowing, but they've been acting weird lately, so they need to stop. They finally get the blood clot, and now they can move on to the killer T-cells, which will kill the other white blood-cells before they can get to their target. White White says that he doesn't want to run into the lung, because he'd rather die than run into it. He says that