Freaky Medical Curiosities
I’ve stumbled across a couple medical curiosities lately that I thought I’d share.
Transplanted hearts never feel like your own.
You can read one lady’s account of living with with a transplanted heart here. What got to me about this story (aside from a life time of anti-rejection meds and other complications), and is something that had never occurred to me before is that when you transplant a heart you have to sever all of the nerves that connect to the rest of the body, and, of course, these don’t grow back. Because the nerves aren’t connected, the new heart never feels like your own. It beats like a stranger inside your chest.
One of the other curious bits referenced in the piece linked above, is that because your heart is not connected to your nervous system, it can only respond to chemical changes. Meaning when you get scared or for some reason flood your system with adrenalin, your heart starts to freak out – but this only happens after a relatively significant lag. In essence, your heart’s reactions can be behind your brains’ by minutes.
The other odd duck I stumbled across was Ondine’s Curse. Ondine’s curse is usually a birth defect, or the result of serious brain injury and is almost always fatal – because you have to remain conscious or you stop breathing. It’s caused by damage to your brainstem, where all the controls for your autonomic systems reside, including breathing. So if you fall asleep, fall unconscious or you know, just forget to fucking breathe than you pass out and die. The idea of having to purposefully draw each and every breath OR YOU DIE is some scary, scary shit.
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