#swiiim

you receive SCRATCH N SNIFF STICKERS

Once my friend stared me dead in the eyes and ate an entire hard-boiled egg with the shell on in one go. They would not stop, they would not spit it out. The cronch it made haunts my every waking moment

I have eaten: A jelly bean lying on the court of the gymnasium, a PopTart from the trash with its wrapper open, half of a hard-boiled egg that was a month old, a lollipop from the top shelf in the sculpture studio, toast my cat licked, and an innumerable amount of snacks off of the floor. I also once ate Doritos with ice cream. I don’t know how many of these are Food Crimes but I needed to confess somehow

existential-crisis-professional said: Food crime: chocolate Chex and spicy queso

swiiim said: doritos and milk. eat it like cereal. bad

aestheticisdeadforever said: Idk what we’re talking about but I eat kiwis with the skin on

thank! you! for! asking!

A bit of background information: bones are made up of osteoblasts (cells that build bones), osteoclasts (cells that break down bone), and osteocytes (cells that just hang out and communicate with bone tissue). An important task osteocytes have is sensing mechanical load--for example, if you were to stand up, you would put a mechanical load on your femur, because you’re putting weight on it.

Stress shielding occurs most often when someone gets a hip replacement--essentially, the top of your femur that fits into your pelvic socket gets sawed off, and is replaced by a nice new metal socket attached to a metal rod that is physically hammered into the marrow of the femur (it fits right in!). Here is a picture of a hip replacement--it might help you better envision the process I’m describing.

So what happens when this cool new hip starts integrating into the body and bearing mechanical load is the osteocytes (those cool little dudes that sense loading) get confused! They start realizing that less weight is borne by the original bone, and more weight is borne by the metal implant! So in response, to make less work for themselves, they tell the osteoclasts to start eating the extra bone and the osteoblasts to stop building bone in the new area! Essentially, when a hip implant is inserted, stress shielding occurs and makes the bone less dense and weaker around the implant.

I find this a little hard to pinpoint, but they bear a striking resemblance to my old neighbour Märtha.

I remember her in her late 80s, 4.9ft tall and suitably round with thick snowy white curls, always a box of brown rock sugar in the pantry, and a face just made for smiling but make no mistake: She survived the burning of Ålesund, the great war, the Spanish flu, and her husband, and she will survive you.