TRUNKS – and some other stuff we carry around

If you are an average human being, you are constantly carrying a trunk around; it’s part of our anatomy. It’s also called lower mid-section, I’m told. I thought trunks were those long things in front of elephants or the rear part of most cars for luggage or the occasional lifeless body of an unfortunate gangster. Calling our mid-section a trunk doesn’t really make any sense. There are so many things we have inside our bodies that we don’t even know we have, don’t know what they are called or what their functions are. So, don’t you think we should pay more attention to our inner selves? I think we should, as it’s all rather important stuff, I’m told.

By the way, a trunk is also that big bulky object sitting in our attic; it belonged to my dearly departed great-grandmother. Nobody has dared open it; perhaps my great-grandmother is actually still with us – inside that trunk. I never met my great-grandmother, so I probably wouldn’t recognize her anyway, if it was really her. It’s confusing with all those trunks. Sorry, got off track a bit; let’s quickly move back to our inner selves…

I’ve always been fascinated with the human body. When I was about 12, that fascination was solely concentrated on Candy Floss (not her real name). She was Playboy Bunny-of-the-Month; but for a much longer time, Candy was my Bunny Forever, as a poster hanging on the wall. I still fantasize about those big – err, Candy’s smile.

For the most part I see the exterior of the human body as a live sculpture; so many exciting varieties as well as many not so really that exciting variations. Way back in the days, female body-shapes were healthy, with overall bigger proportions, as we see in paintings and sculptures from that time; I always found those bodies sensuous in their healthiness looking size and shape.

The male body was shown in lean, strong and muscular terms and still makes for today’s ‘ideal’ manly shape. I mean, what man wouldn’t like to go around with a body like Michelangelo’s famous Renaissance sculpture of ‘David”? (NO, not David Beckham, though his body is not to snicker about either - at all). 

But how much do we actually know about the inside parts of our bodies; how do all those things function, what does THAT part do, and how does it do it and especially why? Let alone, what the heck is it called and shouldn’t I at least be able to pronounce some of it correctly? When my doctor mentions any of those weird things, I automatically say: ‘bless you’ or ‘gesundheit’ if she is from Kiel, Germany. Our inner-bodies are very confusing.

To get to know my inner self better, I went through our book-case and pulled out ATLAS OF PATHOPHYSIOLOGY (yeah, YOU try to say that 10 times really fast). It has a rather gross picture of what I believe to be somebody’s lower intestines, a cut-through stomach and some other peculiar and nasty looking stuff.

On page 204 the headline screams: PERITONITIS. Okay, not too difficult to get out, but what the heck is it, and what organs are involved? I found out that peritonitis is an acute or chronic inflammation of the peritoneum (Yeah, like I didn’t know that – duh), the membrane that lines the abdominal cavity and cover visceral organs. Among the causes of peritonitis is renal failure (what?), Appendicitis & Diverticulitis, ulcerate colitis, abdominal neoplasm, volvulus, strangulated obstruction and other stuff like that. The thing is that this could happen to you and some of your organs and you wouldn’t have a clue what hit you and what stuff inside you that it hit - assumingly; just trying to pronounce any of it is marred with nervous stuttering, utter embarrassment and deep reddish blushing, mixed with massive confusion.

MYASTHENIA GRAVIS is catching me on page 148. It’s an autoimmune disorder that causes sporadic, but progressive (huh?) weakness and abnormal fatigability of striated (skeletal, I think) muscles, and so forth. Exact cause unknown but it can happen to females in their 20-30s and the male gender age 60-70. OMG I could get that stuff now – if I only knew what the heck it is.

I feel pathetically ignorant that I am not more educated (read: concerned / interested) with respect to the inner me – and you should be as well, not about my inner me, but about your inner you; don’t you think?

We trust what we are told and we are obviously fine with that. “Drink 16 gallons of water daily” (it’s about 60 liters, if you are a metrics fan). But do we really know why all this water is good for us? I quickly learned that it taught me great bladder-control and has installed in me the constant awareness of where the nearest restroom, bathroom, toilet or tree is. Besides that, water is a necessity for us and most of our organs, because without water we would shrivel away rather fast. We consist of about 75% water and just that fact makes it logical to inhale as much as we can. Oh, and it does do a lot of cleansing of some of the many organs we drag around; kidneys are on top of my list of organs that I somewhat ‘understand’...

So what do kidneys do? The blood goes around inside us, reaching all corners of our bodies, picking up dust and dirt and other waste products, which the kidneys then extract as the blood runs through them (yeah, we have two of those things); a bit of inner-body clean-up. Then we dispose of those bad things through visits to the bathroom or behind that tree over there, hence the vast quantities of water we should inhale.

When I at times try to schematically envision the functions of my body’s inner workings, I quickly realize how ignorant I am and how I pathetically, though successfully have learned just about nothing concerning any of that important stuff – because it is all really very important. I have more so kept an eye on what I saw in the mirror, and as long as I was okay with what I saw, hey why bother with what’s under my skin – huh?

I trust that if we really tried hard to learn a lot more about what it is we are carrying around inside us, inside that trunk of ours and beyond, if we learned and really cared about what the parts do, how they do it and especially what importance they all have, we would be so much more aware of what we have to do to stay healthy or healthier. We can seriously achieve a much higher quality of life, happiness and especially health, by being more informed. Knowledge can be extremely powerful that way – and that in itself, is very good to know… both inside and out.