On the Fore-front

- 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.

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?” (!!!!!??!?!??!???)

you think you have One Set Of DNA That Tells You What You Are but that's not true. every single cell in your body is going to be slightly different from each other. not enough to be considered separate individuals in terms of genetics, but different enough to cause weird things to happen. and that's not even counting chimeras AKA people with two distinct individuals' DNA mixed around (or not!) in their body.

and even when it does work, DNA is THE prime example of spaghetti code. a lot of my peers in computer science tend to think of DNA as this straightforward code that the body follows to make whatever it needs to but genetics is such a complicated thing. DNA breaks down all the time, it mutates, when it works it's not like it's magic building your body, the DNA ends up signalling the production proteins and other molecules that then interact with other cells in ways that may interfere with how DNA is expressed there. there's thousands of proteins, hundreds of molecular building blocks, enzymes, and they all interact with each other in extremely complicated ways. a teeny tiny touch here and there could fundamentally alter the functioning of a cell, so much so that it does something truly unexpected (looking at you, cancer).

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ive been pondering on this suggestion and came up with a whole comics haha

Even if Hellen deeply cares about Sam, her way of helping wouldn't be anywhere near gentle... but on the other hand, maybe it would be enough to slap Sam out from the spiral!

Sam could get a gentler and nicer support later from Audrey or Lyle or Jeanne or Joel

Rat baby would recognize Sam and love him all the same

Dan sucks at this definitely but he would still be friend and would offer to play games with Sam