Exploding vestigial organs!!!

The cecum is the beginning of the large intestine. The size of a mammal's cecum has to do with the amount of cellulose, or difficult to digest plant matter, an animal eats. The koala bear, whose diet is exclusively eucalyptus leaves, has a cecum equal in size to the rest of its intestine.

The human cecum is relatively small. The green plant matter that we do eat tends to be low in cellulose. Most scientists who study human anatomy think that the appendix, a 2-6 inch protrusion from the end of the cecum, is a leftover from a time when our cecum was much bigger and our diet was much higher in cellulose. That is why most people (with the exception of those who don't believe in evolution) call the appendix a vestigial organ. Comically, there are several web sites by people who, in an effort to disprove evolution, come up with functions for the appendix has in the human body.

That little vestige of times past caused me some trouble this week. When the appendix starts to get infected it feels like a stomachache. After a day or so it feels like you have a little fiery cauldron in the lower part of your abdomen. Every time you move or go over a bump in the car, the cauldron spills over and its hot contents scald your abdominal area. Over the next period of time, the exceedingly stubborn (read: ME) try to dismiss this continually heating cauldron as advanced indigestion. Pretty soon, however, the cauldron itself starts cracking.

It was about this time, at Julia and Nina's urging, that I walked into the emergency room. A few hours later I was blissfully sedated with an IV of saline and antibiotics while a surgeon was removing the burst appendix from my body. My first Valentines Day present was a syringe of morphine into my IV in the post-operative recovery room.

As I sit here on Friday, one day after being released from the hospital, I feel extremely grateful to be alive. One or two generations ago the same condition could be fatal. Modern medicine has its problems, but its hard not to be in awe of its ability to pluck people from the depths of illness. Antibiotics, for example, are so ubiquitous these days that we are developing some highly resistant bacteria. Without them, however, my recovery process from a gut full of intestinal juice would not have nearly as smooth.

Even the IV itself, which hydrated and relaxed me when my body was starting to shut down, was not in use as a common practice 100 years ago. Surgeons would commonly lose patients to shock while performing surgery.

So I have to be largely off of my feet for the next few weeks, and I figured it was as good a time as any to get rumen-ating again.

Jon