Welcome to our daily Bitachon series. We're going through Sha'ar HaBechinah . We learned yesterday that we have a responsibility to open the wrapping on the gift that God gave us. One of the gifts is our body, and there's millions of gifts, and I'm not exaggerating. Let's go through our blood vessels. When you get a cut, it heals. No one thinks about that. You get a scab, big deal. You ever tear your clothing and suddenly it's sewed up by itself? Strange, isn't it? So let's analyze what happens when you get a scab. You say, what do I have to know about this stuff for? Is this going back to science class? Because these are gifts of God, and intellect requires that we appreciate our gifts. So think of your blood vessels like a system of pipes running through your house. The pipe springs a leak, you need a way to patch it up immediately to stop the water, in our case, it's the blood, from flooding out. Well, your body has an automatic emergency repair crew for this exact purpose. The process is called hemostasis. Hemo is blood, stasis means stopping. And there's three main steps. The first one is the squeeze, vasoconstriction, which means the moment a blood vessel is cut, your body's first reaction is to reduce the flow of that area. Now, body's first reaction, you know, what is that? That's a nice scientific term. Who told the body to react? That's God. So the muscles in the wall of the blood vessels tighten and clamp down. The analogy, it's like turning off the main water valve or squeezing a garden hose to stop the flow of the water. This limits how much blood can escape while the repair begins. Number two, the plug, which is called platelet aggregation. The first responders arrive. These are the platelets, tiny sticky cell fragments floating in your blood. They're always there. What happens? When the platelets touch the jagged edge of a broken vessel, they get activated. This is wild. Little microscopic vessels, when they're torn, create a jagged edge. This activates the platelets. They change shape, become spiky and sticky. They clump together at the site of the cut to form a temporary plug. The analogy, think of this like sticking a piece of chewing gum or wet clay over the hole in the pipe. It stops the immediate leak, but it's soft and won't hold for long against high pressure. Stage three, the glue, the coagulation cascade. To make the repair permanent, the blood, the body needs to reinforce the soft platelet plug with something stronger. This is where the coagulation cascade comes in. Dozens of proteins in your blood are called clotting factor. By the way, parenthetically, hemophiliacs don't have clotting factors. But Baruch Hashem , we do. That wakes it up a chain reaction and creates a tough stringy protein called fibrin. It's like a steel mesh or net. It wraps around the soft platelet plug and hardens, turning the chewing gum into reinforced concrete. This creates a solid scab that seals the wound completely until the skin heals underneath. But there's really a step after that, which is the cleanup, which happens days or weeks later. Once the skin and vessel wall have healed underneath the scab, you don't need the clot anymore. Your body releases a different enzyme called plasmin, that acts like a pair of molecular scissors. It cuts the fibrin mesh into tiny pieces. The scab falls off or dissolves and blood flows normally again. This is craziness what's going on inside our body at all times. Now what's interesting, one of the very uncomfortable things is paper cuts. Now, paper cuts just last. Why? They're seemingly so innocent. The answer is because since they're shallow, and they don't cause significant bleeding, the blood clotting system doesn't get triggered and therefore it leaves it as it is. This is just one small little example of the wondrous things that are happening at all times inside of us. And it behooves us to think about it and appreciate it.