this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass
i knew a surgeon and he once told me “nobodys insides look like how the textbooks say they will. you never know what you’re going to find in there once you open them up” and that was easily the most ominous thing anyone’s ever said to me
when i was taking my first year anatomy lab, we’d occasionally find a cadaver where things would branch off or attach in the wrong order, and when we’d ask our prof about it, he’d just shrug and say “they must not have read the book”
When my friend was in med school one of the cadavers donated for them to autopsy didn’t have a belly button, just smooth skin.
In the past 10 years of teaching in an anatomy lab, I have seen:
- A donor with a scrotum the size of my head. When we opened it up, we discovered it was a MASSIVE inguinal hernia and a good 1.5 ft of intestine were trapped down there.
- A donor with situs inversus totalis, whose organs were a mirror image of what we normally see (ie their heart pointed right and their liver was on the left, just for starters)
- A donor whose right common carotid artery branched off the aorta waaay over on the left hand side of the body and crossed alllll the way back across the thorax to get where it needed to be.
- A donor with 4 lobes for their right lung (should only be 3). We named the 4th lobe the Lisa Loeb, but all of the students were too young to appreciate our sparkling wit.
- A shocking variety of penile and breast implants. Y'all would not believe the number of different ways science has come up to counteract gravity.
- A couple of cases of ectopic kidneys, where a kidney didn’t rise to its typical position just deep to the lowest ribs and instead stayed in the pelvis.
There is probably some other stuff that I am forgetting. Take home point is: the human body is weird and wonderful and you should learn more about yours!
….duuude.
Spleens Georg
14???????
My contribution: client co pinched nerve in L side of neck. I asked about health hx; she said, “I’ve got some extra ribs on that side.”
me: “some?” (!!!!!??!?!??!???)
Some was 2, but that’s crazy enough.
Yeah, I don’t discover the anatomical weirdness but I’ve had clients come in with extra ribs, missing ribs, extra vertebra, accessory muscles (that’s when you have duplicates - sometimes fine, sometimes not), bones connected where they shouldn’t be (spoiler: if your lumbar spine is connected to your hip, it Causes Problems), all sorts of stuff. Bodies are weird!
More from the notes
This made me remember that I had a friend in high school who had one thumb that was like half an inch shorter than the other. Not sure how that happened.
