Nerdgasm: How to kill someone you really hate

Hellooooooooooooo university-type peoples!

I've done it!  I've escaped from the clutches of the Lapsansky monster's claws ONCE AND FOR ALL. Join me upon my scintillating pedestal of academic GLORY, weary travelers!  THIS BITCH IS A SENIOR IN COLLEGE.

After stepping out of my human physiology final yesterday, I had no idea what to do with myself.  I felt like a slave that had just been set free from the clutches of her evil master, a survivor of a nuclear explosion, like Snookie if she had been told that all tanning booths had been shut down forever.  I keep getting these horrible feelings of impending doom as if I've forgotten that I have something due in lab or a poster project or some random bodily function to memorize.  But I don't...and...well...it's absolutely brilliant.

I feel like it's an end of an academic era for me and a bunch of my friends, and I think the only appropriate thing to do is to impart onto you the most important lesson I have learned in human anatomy and physiology with Janice Lapsansky at Western Washington University, which is, of course...




Seriously.  I am well aware that this woman who teaches me is a first-responder, but after two quarters with her, I'm in awe that I don't spontaneously combust all the fucking time.  One little change in the permeability of your cells, one little enzyme cascade that won't shut off, one TINY fluid imbalance, and suddenly you're pooping out every fucking fluid you have in your body, bleeding from every orifice you contain, coughing up parts of your lungs, and having a fucking lunch date over crackers and caviar with your lord zombie Jesus.  (God, it's good to be back.)  It was a butt-smacking good time, learning how my body is built and how its inner workings are fine-tuned.  ...But holy fuck-balls, after that, all you can do is imagine ways things could go awry.  It's even BETTER when your prof brings all those gory details up a) during lecture and b) just as you shove a tasty sandwich in your face.  Without further ado, I give you my master list of horror.

The Top 4 Absolutely, Positively WORST Ways to Die

Mmmmmmmm....platelets....

4. Systemic Blood Clotting:
Yeah basically what happens here is that your body's clotting factors go haywire, and you start making bloody jello shots all over the damn place: lungs, legs, heart, brain.  It's just a coagulated clusterfuck up in this bitch.  The gross and horrifying thing about this is not so much that you are slowly becoming ambrosia salad, but that once you use up all of your clotting proteins, your body can't keep up with the demand.  And when that happens, whatever liquid blood you have left starts POURING out of you.  You bleed from every. fucking. orifice. And there's no coming back from that.  No chance in hell.  Hey, if you're a Twilight fan-girl, I guess this is one way to get Edward to lick you all over with his cold, icy vampire tongue...

3. Congestive Heart Failure

(Full medical animation here.) Ah yes, one of the leading causes of death in this country due to the obesity epidemic, and coincidentally one of the most TERRIFYING ways to end up in a pine box.  Basically, being "5th Big Mac in one sitting" levels of fat puts a shit-ton of stress on your arteries.  In fact, because a person has so much extra surface area, the body has to create more vessels to supply that tissue: a morbidly obese person might have a couple MILES of vasculature in their skin.  MILES.  This puts stress on the heart to increase blood pressure in the form of a horrible never-ending cycle of hormones released to promote constriction of arteries to increase diastolic pressure.  This resistance makes the already-weakened heart pump even HARDER and consequently forces the fluid portion of blood straight into the lungs.  That's right, you literally begin to DROWN IN YOUR OWN FLUIDS.  Most horrifying part of all of this?  It can take MONTHS for a patient to slowly and painfully die from congestive heart failure.  This is quite literally your body's way of telling you to grow gills and find Nemo if you really want to eat him that badly.  Fucking terrifying...though I have come up with a great slogan for it...Congestive Heart Failure: The only way to drown in the desert!

2. Cholera

Ok, so this one came from my microbiology course, but you will see that it more than deserves its spot.  Cholera is caused by an unassuming, strangely sperm-looking bacteria.  Oh yeah, and it's carried in something we absolutely need to live--water--and is transmitted via the "absolutely no need to explain this" fecal-oral route.  Once in its happy home in your small intestine, it buries itself like a frat boy into cleavage straight into your gut lining.  It begins to divide and metabolize, which in turn REALLY FUCKS SHIT UP in the cell.  Your cute little gut lining cells need certain processes to turn on and off at appropriate times, much like how you need to switch on the dishwasher to clean your plates and for the washer to turn off so you can use them again.  Cholera essentially makes it so that the dishwasher never, ever, EVER shuts off.

That came directly out of someone's ass.  PURE CULTURE.

This makes chloride (through the wondrous magic of physiology) POUR out of the cell, followed by water spiked with more bacteria.  Where is all this fluid going, you ask?  You see that bucket in the picture?  Right there...about oh...24 hours a day until you've desiccated yourself to the point of expiration.  Even more horrifying? A typical cholera patient loses up to 20 LITERS of fluid a day, which is all essentially a PURE culture of bacteria.  Twenty liters.  No typo.  Two zero.  Thinking about cleaning out that Nalgene now, aren't you?

1. Gall Stone Complications
It's a gall stone...what could be so bad about a little mineralization?  Your body is a glorious machine of perfection, so how could a little microscopic, meaningless PEBBLE fuck shit up for you?  It takes the right...er...maybe wrong circumstances.  A lot of digestion and absorption of nutrients happens in the first 1/3 of your small intestine (the duodenem).  To do that, the gall bladder and pancreas share branches of a duct to secrete some crazy chemicals into that space to break down that whole pan of brownies you ate because it was finals week.  The pancreas happens to make digestive salts that break down proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

This very picture can be found in my anatomy notes.

So what happens when a gall stone decides to throw a wrench into the works and ruin that food coma for us?  Sometimes they travel.  That little rolling stone will collect no moss, this is true, but it may lodge itself into the pancreatic branch of that duct, causing the pancreas to burst.  When that happens, all of those digestive enzymes are released into the body and you quite literally DIGEST YOURSELF FROM THE INSIDE OUT.  Om nom nom.  Tasty.  Oh and did I mention that there's no coming back from this?  You had probably already guessed that.

And there you have it.  Sorry if you're now terrified to go outside.  I wouldn't recommend researching "viral droplet nuclei transmission" if that is the case, since launch into outer space will start sounding like  viable option for your safety.  Anywho, these nerdy sections (along with Interwebz posts) will all be under the "Nerdgasm" tab on the home page.  

Come back on Wednesday for a Field Guide Update!

Thanks for reading, dweebs.  It's good to be back! <3