I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, and she was talking about this time when she went to a pool and met a lady with no bellybutton. The lady told my friend, whose English is not the best, that she’s always been like this.
Is this possible? I doubt it, but…
You’re joking… right? The belly-button is what’s left from the umbilical cord that supplied nurishment and removed waste for the unborn fetus. The other end is connected to the placenta. It’s usually cut and then tied off after birth. If you have no belly button then you had no umbilical cord and since that’s impossible I would venture to say that your leg has been pulled…
Well, I was extremely skeptical, to say the least. As I told my friend, unless that woman’s name was Eve :), she had a bellybutton. I thought that if there was any possibility that someone would “lose” their bellybutton, through post-birth surgery say, the Dopers would know.
Thanks
Certainly a bellybutton can be altered surgically, to the point of being made nearly undistinguishable. But I bet if you looked close, you’d find a scar. It’s even possible to be born with a very small bellybutton, that heals to be halfway between an innie and and outie, and can be hard to see.
Qadgop, MD
The bellybutton is a superficial structure. It is easily excised. This probably was done therapeutically rather than for cosmetic considerations since bellybuttons are quite in vogue these days. As Qagop said, she must have had a scar.
Why would a surgeon remove a bellybutton? During my surgery clerkship I saw one patient operated on for Crohn’s disease. He had a fistula (tract) connecting his small intestine to the skin of his bellybutton. Consequently, intestinal gook drained from his navel (Truth is so much stranger than fiction). In the OR, the fistula was excised along with the patient’s bellybutton.
It can look that way if her swimming bottom (assuming she’s wearing a 2 piece swimming suit) has been pulled above and over her belly button.
Next time you see that lady pull her bottom down and I bet you’ll find her bb.
When I was in college I was friendly with a girl who did not have a belly button. She claimed she’d been born without one, and said she’d been written up in The New England Journal of Medicine when she was born.
Her stomach was absolutely scarless. Her body shape was a tad off; although she was not fat or heavy, her stomach always had a tight, swollen appearance.
Although we were friends, I just couldn’t pursue this with her. I was a little repulsed and my curiosity couldn’t overcome that.
My only clue is The New England Journal of Medicine. Her year of birth was 1953, so the article she referred to would have appeared there in either 1953 or 1954. Does anyone know how I could research this?
She could be an extra terrestrial disguised as a human to infiltrate this planet.
Or maybe not…
Maybe it was located on another part of her body. Like her back? I could conceivable see how that could happen and she could still survive. Or maybe she just had that perfect fine line between and innie and an outie
During one of those Discovery Channel/TLC shows about a pair of conjoined twins (joined at the abdomen) it was mentioned that, following the surgery to separate them, the doctors would do reconstructive surgery to create navels for the twins. Perhaps this woman had some sort of surgery as an infant and did not have the plastic surgery to make her look more normal?
Hmm. A Google search for “birth defects abdominal umbilicus” turns up a whole bunch of websites dealing with arcane and incomprehensible descriptions of various abdominal birth defects. Some of these sound to my admittedly non-tech ears like they might involve fetal or peri-natal surgery that might result in a newborn not having a bellybutton.
I’m not going to post any links because frankly I’m not sure what it all means. But it does sound like the girl born in 1953 could be telling the truth. I’d think that what would be a huge belly scar on a newborn would fade and look smaller and be fairly invisible on a grownup.
Do you think she was written up in the New England Journal of Medicine not because she was born without a navel, but because she underwent a surgery that was revolutionary for an infant in 1953? Something really did not look right about her stomach (she always looked about four months pregnant), maybe that was a byproduct of previous surgery or some medical abnormality. But really, there was not a single mark, color, indentation, or scar on her.
Repair of a birth defect called gastroschisis results in absence of a bellybutton. Gastroschisis is the herniation of the abdominal contents through a defect in the anterior abdominal wall, usually just lateral to the bellybutton. Infants are born with a portion of their intestines outside the body. Surgical correction involves the return of the viscera to the abdomen and closure of the defect. In the process, the umbilicus is removed. See this linkfor a follow up study of infants born with this condition.
I came up empty on a search for congenital absence of the umbilicus (however, I don’t think PubMed goes back to 1953). One imagines that given the role of the umbilicus during intrauterine life (namely, it’s the portal for delivery of O[sub]2[/sub], nutrients, hormones and antibody to the rapidly growing fetus as well as removal of the waste products of fetal metabolism) such a condition is incompatible with life. I think that chick was crapping you positive, riblet.
I tentatively disagree. Inside the fetus, the vessels going through the umbilicus must connect with organs inside the fetus. The organs are in defined positions. An ectopic umbilicus suggests that these connections are made in odd ways or that the organs receiving the connections are in odd places. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which this doesn’t lead to fetal demise or at the least, very severe birth defects.
Scars acquired during infancy tend to heal very, very well. Maybe that’s the answer.
I had a good friend who had his bellybutton removed within a year of his birth. It apparently became infected shortly not long after his birth and the doctor with the consent of his parents had the navel removed. There was a slight scar, but it was hardly noticeable. He too was born in 1952/53. Significant? Pod people? Plot line for a bad science fiction story? or just somewhat common surgery at the time?
I should also mention that a major schism occurred in the Cathloic church over the question whether Adam had a bellybuttom or not. People actually got excommunicated over it.
TV
I should perhaps note at this point that one of my aunts (I can’t remember which one, though) has two belly buttons. Admittedly, one of them isn’t a genuine umbilical scar, but it looks just like it. It was the result of a childhood accident with a fishing hook.
I’ve also heard some ladies say that their navels disappear during pregnancy, apparently from the skin being stretched so tight.
I once dated a girl with no discernable bellybutton. And yes, I had ample opportunities to look all over for it. With the lights on. And off.
I’d go into more detail, but I’m starting to involuntarily shiver. 
sethdallob:
Well, was she born in 1953? We may be on to something here!
–sublight.
Advancing omphalistic epistemology since 1971.
My mother has no bellybutton. She’s had a few surgeries in the last ten years or so, including a hysterectomy, gall bladder removal, and a stomach staple. I don’t recall which procedure it happened during, but on one of those surgeries, the doctors cut her abdomen open through the navel, and sewed it up as they closed up her incision.