Medical Professionals Share Horrifying Body Facts
The responses I received did NOT disappoint. Without further ado, here are their 15 most creepy and horrifying body facts:
"You can cough, sneeze, or vomit so hard you can collapse your lung."
"Some people have what are called blebs on their lungs. I think of it like a blister on the lung. Blisters, well, they pop. If you do any of the above so, so, so hard or prolonged, that blister can rupture and cause an opening where air rushes into the pleural space (area between your lung and rib cage) and your lung will collapse. It's normally men. I've had patients that this has happened to from mundane things such as vomiting or from food poisoning."—ICU Nurse
"You can contract chlamydia in your eyes. Usually, through the method you would think. I've seen two cases in 10 years, always because someone was cheating."
"You really do see the light leave someone's eyes when they die. Almost like dead fish eyeballs. I've seen so many dead bodies, especially since I worked both rounds of COVID in the ICU."
"Your belly button is a tiny jungle of bacteria — and it can host species not found anywhere else on Earth."
"In a study by the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, scientists swabbed hundreds of navels and discovered thousands of bacterial species — many unique to individuals, and some previously unknown to science. It's basically a personalized petri dish in the middle of your torso."—Naturopathic Doctor
"Cancer stinks. Like literally, it smells putrid, especially breast and skin cancer (in my experience). I've had so many cancer patients where you can just smell the tumors. It's like rotten, putrid, sour meat that's been rotting in the sun for weeks. Like a deer carcass that's been left on the side of the road in the summer heat for a month."
"You can slow somebody's heart rate by pressing on their eyeballs. The individual response is fairly variable, but in some people it's pronounced enough that pressing on their eyeballs will actually stop their heart entirely!"
"The elderly experiencing memory loss has been linked to having constipation."
—ApatheticMoose
"Lymph nodes are super tiny! I was in the OR watching my brain-dead patient getting her organs removed for transplant. They showed me the lymph nodes. I had no idea they were so tiny because they can cause such huge and painful problems. It was about the size of a single Nerds candy. All scattered throughout our body are Nerd candies."
"I attended a bedridden, 86-year-old man who was cared for by his wife at home, who was also in her 80s. He developed a huge bedsore on his lower back, the size of a dinner plate, that exposed his spine and surrounding muscles. The wound was full of pus, and some maggots crawled out. One thing to learn about the skin: A sore will start to develop on healthy, intact skin if pressure is applied to it, even for less than a week. It's good practice to turn a bedridden patient to one side a few times to avoid the complication of bed sores."
—Retired Family Doctor
"Fat can be yellow like chicken fat. I was in the OR watching my brain-dead patient's organs get harvested for transplant. When they took out the heart, the surgeon pointed out things on the heart before it was bagged and put on ice in a cooler. The heart was somewhat fatty, and the fat looked like yellow chicken fat. I mean, we are still all meat in the end."
"Bartholin gland. It produces the vagina's lubricant and can get clogged or develop cysts. As a nurse, I have had patients with this, and it seems very, very painful!"
"You can get lidocaine poisoning with everyday over-the-counter products. Lidocaine creams, patches, ointments, whatever."
"Your blood can become so fatty that you can see the fat separate, like meat tallow."
"I had a patient whose lipase was greater than 50,000. It was during COVID. He was so lonely that he nearly ate himself to death. He had a central line. I drew up my blood waste and set it on the sink. I forgot it was there until a little while later. When I went to throw it away, the blood and fat had separated. Half of the syringe was dark red blood, and the other half was milky and fatty."—ICU Nurse
"Humans have anal glands! Owners of dogs and cats may know that there are two fluid-holding glands on the anus. This incredibly stinky fluid is squeezed out as a firm stool passes through the anus. Sometimes the glands become impacted and need to be expressed (squeezed) and/or treated for infection. Luckily, ours are microscopic, but every pet owner I have told about this is horrified."
And finally...
"You have more bacteria cells in your body than you have human cells in your body. We are basically walking bacteria factories."
Did any of these body facts surprise you? Medical professionals, what are some things you know about the human body that most people don't? Tell us in the comments below or use this Google form to remain anonymous.
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That acrimony has become an essential tool in Kennedy's efforts to undermine vaccines. 'It is leverage,' Dorit Reiss, a vaccine-law expert at UC Law San Francisco, told me. 'It is a way to justify doing things that he wouldn't be able to get away with otherwise.' COVID revenge has defined the second Trump administration's health policy from the beginning. Kennedy and his allies have ousted prominent HHS officials who played key roles in the development of COVID policy, as well as scientists at the National Institutes of Health, including close colleagues of Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (and, according to Trump, an idiot and a 'disaster'). In June, Kennedy dismissed every member of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which has helped shape COVID-vaccine recommendations, and handpicked replacements for them. 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The FDA has made it harder for manufacturers to bring new COVID shots to market, narrowed who can get the Novavax shot, and approved the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for only a limited group of children, over the objections of agency experts. For its part, the CDC softened its COVID-shot guidance for pregnant people and children, after Kennedy—who has described the shots as 'the deadliest vaccine ever made'—tried to unilaterally remove it. Experts told me they fear that what access remains to the shots for children and adults could still be abolished; so could COVID-vaccine manufacturers' current protection from liability. (Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, said in an email that the department would not comment on potential regulatory changes.) The latest assault against mRNA vaccines, experts told me, is difficult to disentangle from the administration's pushback on COVID shots—which, because of the pandemic, the public now views as synonymous with the technology, Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told me. Kennedy justified the mRNA cuts by suggesting—in contrast to a wealth of evidence—that the vaccines' risks outweigh their benefits, and that they 'fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.' And he insisted, without proof, that mRNA vaccines prolong pandemics. Meanwhile, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya argued that the cancellations were driven by a lack of public trust in the technology itself. In May, the Trump administration also pulled more than $700 million in funds from Moderna that had initially been awarded to develop mRNA-based flu vaccines. 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'People trust the COVID vaccines less,' Nuzzo told me, which makes it easy for the administration's vaccine opponents to use attacks on those vaccines as purchase for broader assaults. For all their COVID-centric hype, mRNA vaccines have long been under development for many unrelated diseases. And experts now worry that the blockades currently in place for certain types of mRNA vaccines could soon extend to other, similar technologies, including mRNA-based therapies in development for cancer and genetic disease, which might not make it through the approval process at Kennedy's FDA. (Nixon said HHS would continue to invest in mRNA research for cancer and other complex diseases.) Casting doubt on COVID shots makes other vaccines that have been vetted in the same way—and found to be safe and effective, based on high-quality data—look dubious. 'Once you establish that it's okay to override something for COVID,' Reiss told me, 'it's much easier to say, 'Well, now we're going to unrecommend MMR.'' (Kennedy's ACIP plans to review the entire childhood-immunization schedule and assess its cumulative effects.) Plenty of other avenues remain for Kennedy to play on COVID discontent—fear of the shots' side effects, distaste for mandates, declining trust in public health and medical experts —to pull back the government's support for vaccination. He has announced, for instance, his intention to reform the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which helps protect manufacturers from lawsuits over illegitimate claims about a vaccine's health effects, and his plans to find 'ways to enlarge that program so that COVID-vaccine-injured people can be compensated.' Some of the experts I spoke with fear that the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee—the agency's rough equivalent of ACIP—could be remade in Kennedy's vision. The administration has also been very willing to rescind federal funding from universities in order to forward its own ideas: Kennedy could, perhaps, threaten to withhold money from universities that require any vaccines for students. Kennedy has also insisted that 'we need to stop trusting the experts'—that Americans, for instance, shouldn't have been discouraged from doing their own research during the pandemic. He could use COVID as an excuse to make that maxim Americans' reality: Many public-health and infectious-disease-focused professional societies rely on at least some degree of federal funding, Nirav D. Shah, a former principal deputy director of the CDC, told me. 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This current administration will have left the nation with few other options.
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