There are many outstanding organs in the human body - like the heart, lungs and brain, doing their jobs under tough conditions and standing up to incredible abuse. Then there are the organs who have a much easier time of it, but can’t seem to avoid being attention whores and drama queens.
Bearing in mind that I do not necessarily have personal issues with any of these organs (their eccentricities are constantly on display in a pathologist’s job), here are some of the top offenders:
- Organs that serve as conduits, but can’t even get that simple task right.
First, there is the esophagus, just your average muscular tube. With a semi-normal host who eats three times daily, that means at best a couple hours of real work and lots of time off. But that’s apparently too much to ask. Reflux? Give me a break. Look, you’ve been close neighbors with the stomach for eons (evolutionarily speaking). The stomach makes acid. Deal with it. If a little squirts your way, you’ve got a perfectly adequate sphincter to block it. When a bit leaks through, don’t get your nerve endings all worked up and produce massive burning sensations and worrisome chest pain - or worse, getting into a premalignant snit over it (Barrett’s esophagus).
The colon, though is worse. What’s up with this irritable bowel stuff? What have you got to be so irritated over? True, you’re full of shit most of the time, but that’s your fault. If you worked right, you could take care of things in the morning and have the rest of the day free for tennis and light reading. Instead you’re either nonfunctional or overactive. And at the least “insult”, you’ve got one standard passive-aggressive response: Let’s make polyps!
Look at your neighbor upstream, the small bowel. It’s longer than you and has a more complex job. You don’t see it cramping, complaining and making polyps at every turn. And speaking of complaining - could you hold down the noise? Just this week Ann Landers had a letter from a poor woman who did something entirely innocent like eating a three-bean salad or rabbit casserole - then at church service the resulting fart symphony was so embarassing that she is considering never going back to that church again. You’re impeding her spiritual growth. This is pretty hoity-toity stuff for an organ that isn’t even essential anyway. Plenty of people get along without a colon if they need to.
Other non-essential organs know their place. Take the spleen. You can live handily without a spleen. It’s a humble organ that doesn’t cause trouble. When’s the last time you heard someone say “I can’t go in to work today - my spleen is cramping up something awful.” Or, “Honey, pull into that rest area. I’ve got to vent my spleen.” On the other hand, the colon is always causing us trouble that way.
One more organ to gripe about is the thyroid. It’s passive-aggressive too. Since it is a solid organ, its knee-jerk response to any given stimulus is “Let’s make nodules!” Doctors can’t tell through scans which are Good Nodules and which are Bad, so they have to stick needles in the nodules, yank out cells, and I’m stuck looking at five zillion slides a day trying to interpret the mess. I am sick of the thyroid. I loathe it with the intensity of a billion suns. I never want to see another thyroid fine needle aspirate. I finish one, two more spring up in its place! I wanna go home.
Thank you, my spleen is vented.
I’m unaware of any adverse effects of retrograde ejaculation. That is, unless you’re trying to fertilize someone. That could be a problem.)
