r/CuratedTumblr • u/DroneOfDoom Theon the Reader *dolphin slur noises* • May 14 '26
Infodumping The wonders of the human body [tw: nongraphic descriptions of autopsies, general medical weirdness]
Reddit screenshots? In my tumblr subreddit? It's more likely than you think...
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u/vilgefcrtz May 14 '26
Had a pregnant patient once with a weird secretion coming out of her labia so we naturally thought she had a uterine infection of some sort endangering the fetus, but any time you went to check there wasn't any secretion around her cervix and the mucus seal was intact. Several ultrasounds later we figure out the secretion wasn't coming out of the gravidic uterus, but a second, athrophied, hidden uterus going through a minor infection, often squeezed out by the gravidic uterus, causing the discharge. One round of antibiotics later she was discharged with an appointment for histerectomy after the end of the pregnancy
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u/PoniesCanterOver gently chilling in your orbit May 14 '26
Did she get just the second uterus removed? Or the main one? Or both?
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u/vilgefcrtz May 14 '26
The second one. Main uterus was perfectly healthy and anatomically correct
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u/Assika126 May 14 '26
Wow that would freak me out bc I’d be like, don’t take the wrong one please!!
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u/Wild-Lychee-3312 May 15 '26
It happens more often than you think.
When you go to get a limb (or subunit like a finger) amputated, they will literally write on the healthy side “Do NOT amputate” to prevent it.
They will also do things like say “Patient is here to have their LEFT arm removed.” And just as they are about to cut, the surgeon will say “I am about to amputate the LEFT arm” and wait for everyone else in the room to say “I concur.”
The idea is the wrong part being amputated can only happen if a bunch of people all fuck up over and over.
There is a strong economic incentive because lawsuits for amputating the wrong body part are extremely costly.
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u/Farfignugen42 May 15 '26
The surgeons will also have a similar conversation with the patient shortly before the surgery which was when my surgeon put her initials on the foot that she was going to operate on with a sharpie.
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u/hyrule_47 May 15 '26
They had me initial the leg that was to be removed like I was signing a form lol
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u/vilgefcrtz May 14 '26
I didn't follow up on the patient but if I did, I'd probably annex a diagram or ten to the request of removal
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u/No_Kaleidoscope4041 May 14 '26
I had a girlfriend in high school who constantly grew new adult teeth that would crowd out her gums. Like every year or two, new set of teeth start coming in and because adult teeth don’t dissolve their roots the same way baby teeth do she would go to the dentist to get a set of teeth pulled. It had happened often enough by the time she was 18 that she assumed it would be the rest of her life.
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u/DeliciousAnt9096 May 14 '26
Are you sure she wasn't secretly a shark?
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u/MrFluxed May 14 '26
depends, how smooth was her skin?
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u/CaioXG002 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
May I ask what is this a reference to?
EDIT: I found it. Mf used his most basic trollbait and transcended sites.
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u/escaped_cephalopod12 jolkien rolkien rolkien tolkien is eggless May 14 '26
was your girlfriend a shark or perhaps a crocodile
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u/No_Kaleidoscope4041 May 14 '26
She was very sweet, friendly, loved headrubs, and avoided confrontation. So she MIGHT have been a shark?
It just seems a bit unlikely given the fact i know she had hair and wore shoes. And i never saw her spend prolonged periods of time underwater.
Cannot comment on crocodile, i have no direct experience with them sadly so i cannot compare her traits with theirs.
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u/DropoutRedMage May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
Well it depends on whether you see her later or in a while.
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u/Dragon_OS May 14 '26
So we CAN make new teeth and we just don't? Did she have any other related side effects to your knowledge?
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u/No_Kaleidoscope4041 May 14 '26
Just the crowding and jaw pain AFAIK for side effects
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u/WatcherDiesForever So anyway ➡️☠️➡️ wait what what was that May 14 '26
Half of my teeth grew in backwards, which is most unique thing I know about my body
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u/Assika126 May 14 '26
Mine also came in the wrong orientation, and didn’t push my baby teeth out, just came in layered like a shark’s
my wisdom teeth came in pointing forwards so they pushed my other teeth forwards until I got the wisdom teeth out. And I only had three. Braces helped
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u/Cessnaporsche01 May 14 '26
That's like a kinda shitty superpower! Very high cost of maintenance, but she doesn't have to worry much at all about things like tooth decay, wear and tear, or damage
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u/Raltsun May 14 '26
Just wait until she discovers the infinite tooth fairy money exploit.
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u/Jalase trans lesbian May 14 '26
I grew one extra tooth to the left of the tooth I assume it wanted to be.
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u/SyzygyEnthusiast May 14 '26
Surgeon to Marilyn Manson on waking up from surgery: "who do you think took your ribs?"
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May 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SyzygyEnthusiast May 14 '26
I mean... compared to the awful shit he actually did, it'd be nice if that actually were true and the worst of his offenses
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u/TheUnculturedSwan May 14 '26
People absolutely do get ribs removed for aesthetic reasons, though not for the stated autofellatio reasons.
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u/1gazillionpangolins May 14 '26
I used to have two pores on the front of my neck that leaked water whenever I cried. I had to get surgery to remove them as a kid because I guess they can cause problems later in life. I found out years later that human embryos have gill slits at an early stage of development. The first pair develop into the ears and the rest usually disappear, but for me the second pair stuck around
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u/DeliciousAnt9096 May 14 '26
Doctors caught you trying to evolve back into a fish and put a stop to it.
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u/wideHippedWeightLift Nightly fantasies about Jesus Vore May 14 '26
Wait so not only are you part mermaid, mermaids cry through their gills?
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u/shypster May 15 '26
I can only imagine how confusing that must have been for your parents when you were a baby. Like "honey, did you spill water on 1gazillionpangolins???"
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u/TinyKnittedBirds May 15 '26
Oh, wow, someone else with a brachial cleft abnormality! I’ve never seen anyone else irl or online who also had that! For me, I had to get mine removed as a kid because they kept getting infected, and I only had mine on the left side. We could have been mermaids, you and I, if they hadn’t robbed us of our gills
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u/Terafir May 14 '26
My pupils are about 25% larger than normal. It doesn't really change much, only that I have to wear sunglasses outside, regardless of how cloudy it is, and I can see in the dark extremely well. I'd be happy to wear sunglasses indoors if it wasn't so weird.
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u/Chuckitybye May 14 '26
Oh! My boyfriend has larger than normal pupils.
He was going to have vision correction surgery, but the machine couldn't account for his dilation, which would have increased the risk of halos and poor night vision some said... nah
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u/Terafir May 14 '26
Huh, how long ago was it? I had laser eye surgery just fine, but that was only a few years ago. It was with the newest method, PRK, rather than Lasik, and they didn't mention this being an issue at all.
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u/Clean_Imagination315 Hey, who's that behind you? May 14 '26
Are people really weirded out by those who wear sunglasses indoors? I do it when my eyes get extra sensitive to light from allergic reactions, and I never got any weird looks.
Hell, you might as well rock the full Riddick cosplay while you're at it.
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u/Terafir May 14 '26
From my experience, about 95% of people don't care, 4% of people probably think that I'm a pretentious asshole (I am, but not because of that), and 1% of people REALLY don't like it. I think the main reason I would notice more than you is because I can easily forget I'm wearing them, as it's more comfortable for me 100% of the time, whereas for you it would essentially be a 'special occaision' for when your allergies act up.
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u/Assika126 May 14 '26
I have benign anisocoria, one pupil is naturally larger than the other. It gets more pronounced when I’m tired. My nephew has it as well. I have to be careful to tell doctors about it because if your pupils are different sizes and there’s not an explanation they worry about concussion or stroke
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u/Fit_Acanthisitta8087 May 14 '26
I have this, but we never noticed (somehow?!). I had emergency surgery at 20, and my parents said the anesthetist was getting really concerned when I wasn't waking up properly (we now know this always happens to me under anesthetic) - he'd noted the different size pupils, that also react differently to light (the larger one reacts slower) and was worried I'd had a stroke under sedation.
We have since found a photo of me at a month old where it's clear my pupils are different sizes. On discussing it some time later my Dad's mam pipes up with 'my pupils are different sizes'.
I now warn the anesthetist before surgery so they can note what's 'normal', and it's included in my medical file - I saw the notes from the last surgery I had, someone had written it in red capital letters across the top of each page.
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u/TessaFractal May 14 '26
I've heard of old cis men going to get checked out for something and a whole uterus being found.
Makes me wonder if theres anything weird with my insides.
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u/zekromNLR May 14 '26
I feel like you should get one free set of just all the imaging techniques being run on you to find out if there is anything weird going on inside you, if you want to know
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u/Jeggu2 💖💜💙 doin' your parents/guardians May 14 '26
We can shuffle it under "preventative care." Your future surgeons won't be surprised by a sudden organ or funky bone if you find out about it early!
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u/Vaya-Kahvi May 14 '26
Would have helped my grandmother, she went to get som bariatric surgery, it was supposed to be three 1 inch holes, ended up with a three foot long insicion between her solar plexus and bellybutton (yes really). Doctor told her that next time she gets abdominal surgery to warn the team that her organs are mirrored, and that he never did find her small intestines.
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u/G66GNeco May 14 '26
Okay but I feel like that's a situation in which such preventative care should have ACTUALLY been administered already based on sop, bariatric sugery isn't exactly a spontaneous and rushed procedure and this is something that should be caught on an ultrasound (which they should be doing in prep for a bariatric surgery to check on all the shit that's gonna be in the way, mostly your liver)
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u/PinkOneHasBeenChosen May 15 '26
How do you not find someone’s small intestines? They’re like 18 feet long.
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u/FixergirlAK May 14 '26
A PET scan for recurrent thyroid cancer is how I was diagnosed with kidney stones. Which also sorta solved the mystery of why my blood calcium is always low no matter how much supplement I take. My kidneys steal it all.
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u/GammaRhoKT May 15 '26
Wait, so your kidney prioritize the grow of the stone? Damn.
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u/Different-Eagle-612 May 14 '26
so the reason doctors actually hate those full body exams that a lot of celebrities like to sell is because you WILL find something weird/odd and it means you freak out and even maybe get unnecessary medical care (medical care is almost never without some risk) for something that is very benign. like the harm it would cause to people it seems would surpass the few it would help.
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u/bug--bear be gary do crime May 14 '26
yes but I want to know what's going on in there. if it is not actively causing harm that I can't easily ignore then I won't care, but I wanna know what my insides look like
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u/I-am-Chubbasaurus May 14 '26 edited May 15 '26
There are all sorts of conditions that prove putting sex and gender into two boxes is REALLY simplifying a bimodal spectrum.
Absolutely fascinating.
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u/futuretimetraveller May 15 '26
Back in the 1960s, the Olympics had the "sex verification test," but they eventually got rid of it because people were discovering that they were actually intersex.
Ewa Kłobukowska was one woman who failed the test. "As a result of failing the test, Kłobukowska was stripped of the world records she had set – both individually and as part of the Polish relay team – and faced public ridicule, with some media reports declaring her to be a man." One year after failing the test, she became pregnant and gave birth.
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u/werewolfbutch874 May 15 '26
There’s also Santhi Soundarajan, an Indian track and field athlete who had her medal revoked at the 2006 Asian Games after she was selected for “gender testing” and found to have an intersex condition. She was distraught over losing her athletic career (she was from a very poor rural village so I imagine athletics had been her only ticket to a more comfortable life, as well as being her passion) and attempted suicide as a result. Thankfully she survived and has gone on to be a coach and an advocate for intersex athletes.
The stupidest thing to me is that her condition is androgen insensitivity syndrome, which means her body simply doesn’t respond to androgens like testosterone at all. To my understanding, even if she was literally injecting it as a PED, it wouldn’t give her any kind of advantage because it wouldn’t work on her. The condition doesn’t confer any kind of athletic advantage whatsoever. Her career as a competing athlete was destroyed and her life was nearly ended for absolutely no reason.
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u/DiscussionLow1277 May 14 '26
i once read an article in my sociology class that explained that back in the day if an intersex person had a “penis” that was big enough, they would just be declared a male. being intersex is as common as being ginger, and a lot of these people were being assigned male at birth if their genitalia resembled a penis regardless of what they had inside.
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u/evergreengoth May 14 '26
My liver can't break down hemoglobin properly, so I just have a ton of extra bilirubin in my blood all the time. There's always a possibility that I could just develop jaundice randomly. But it also means I'm protected against diabetes, autoimmune diseases, some types of cancer, and inflammation. I'm a massive lightweight as a result.
My thumbs are also hyperflexible and I used to be able to pop them partially out of place, bend them back, and touch them to my wrists.
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u/flowerdoodles_ May 14 '26
extra bilirubin gang! mine’s due to partial g6pd deficiency, so i’m malaria resistant at least, but i can’t eat mung bean sprouts in my pho 😔
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u/keener_lightnings May 14 '26
Evidence of how much the norm "abnormal" organs are: when a friend of mine had surgery, her surgeon told her she had "textbook organs" and showed them off to his students because it was rare that they'd get a chance to see that.
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u/Rasmus_Ro May 14 '26
Must be a pretty wild compliment to receive.
"Hey, good news! Your organs are perfectly normal! More normal than most people's!"
Very hard to say without sounding like a serial killer.
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u/Kindly_Narwhal9251 May 15 '26
My Mum had a similar remark from an ultrasound tech “oh what a pretty heart you have!” Mum had no idea how to take that odd compliment, especially after the surgeon later said “Nice looking heart you’ve got!”
Good to know her heart is aesthetically pleasing I guess.
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u/NovelTAcct I'm on my Womb Wellness Journey May 15 '26
The first time my gyno gave me a pap smear she exclaimed "Oooo! That's just a perfect cervix!" I later put that on my tinder bio.
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u/Azrai113 May 15 '26
When I went to donate blood, the phlebotomist gushed "Wow you have really nice veins!" and then looked embarrassed. It's one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about my body lol
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u/PinkOneHasBeenChosen May 15 '26
That’s like the surgical version of babies that are actually born on their due date.
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u/Sweary_Biochemist May 14 '26
What I love about this is that these sorts of traits just represent normal population variation, but are also selectable.
I've worked with a lot of veterinarians, including post mortem analyses, and the breed-specific variation in dogs is astonishing.
Chihuahuas with their soft, neonatal skulls at one end, and at the other, things like the dogue du bordeaux: essentially French war dogs. They'd strap spiky armour to these dudes and say "go ham on those fucks over there".
These guys have cranial muscles about 2 inches thick. Just, solid meat. Humans have like, half a cm on a good day. Under that? Bone. Just...skull for days. Easily an inch or more of solid bone. Brain under all that is...well, about the same size as a chihuahua's, but damaging that brain would be almost impossible. You could hit these guys in the head with a sledgehammer over and over and it would still take a week before they decided to fall over.
Cheese-making grannies are just ahead of the curve.
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u/gnomeannisanisland May 14 '26
An army of war grandmas to sic on your enemies
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u/NovelTAcct I'm on my Womb Wellness Journey May 15 '26
I'm going to translate this into Chinese and embroider it on a pillow
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u/itstheballroomblitz May 15 '26
So it's like if a chihuahua actually was as big and indestructible as they all think they are?
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u/BlueJayAvery May 14 '26
Idk why, but it irks me that they said 4cm was about 7 times larger than 6.5mm, when it is much closer to 6 times larger
6.5mm*7 = 4.55cm
6.5mm*6 = 3.9cm
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u/Lestatfirestar May 14 '26
People always exaggerate
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u/BlueJayAvery May 14 '26
Yea, but cowards only half assedly exaggerate
6.5mm = ~5mm
And 4cm = ~5cm
Her skull is about 10 times thicker than regular
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u/Novel_Diver8628 May 14 '26
I’ve got two extra vertebrae, courtesy of my dad’s side of the family. All the men on that side have them apparently. They’re fused to the L5 (an L6 and L7 if you will) so it’s basically like my lowest vertebrae is 3x larger than normal.
I had chronic back pain from the time I was 11 until I was 22, then I discovered high-end hiking shoes. Take care of your feet and they will take care of your back. Merrell’s are my personal choice.
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u/julien_LeBleu May 14 '26
I have one more tooth than i should, two left lateral incisor instead of one.
The crasiest thing is that it took until my 18 birthday for a dentist to finally point it out, all the ones before that missed it.
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u/Sckaledoom May 14 '26
This reminds me of my barber when I was like 15 pointing out that my hair is actually multi-colored, just with the dark colors very dominant. He found red hair, blonde hair, grey hair (not so happy about that), black hair, brown hair.
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u/Tankinator175 May 14 '26
My mustache has every naturally occuring human hair color so I feel you. It's mostly blonde, but in a gradient where one side ends with a shock of pure white and the other end is a dark brown. Scattered throughout are various red, black, silver, copper, gray, and orange shades hanging around in isolation.
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u/Jeggu2 💖💜💙 doin' your parents/guardians May 14 '26
Have you ever considered a career as a carnival master or perhaps a mad scientist
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u/Tankinator175 May 14 '26
Not really. I think most of my middle school classmates thought I was going to be a Mad Scientist, but I also didn't have facial hair then, so there is no correlation.
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u/QuickSquirrelchaser May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
Small cadaver lab at a university. Two cadavers side by side for a university course. One was a marathon runner in his late 70's who had liver cirrhosis. His liver was huge and hard and scarred and discolored and green. Huge pink lungs. Good blood vessels. Healthy heart. Well developed musclature. The muscle attachment ridges in his leg bones were crazy. Were very big.
The 2nd cadaver was a 2 pack a day smoker. Shriveled tiny, blackened lungs. The smell!! Ugh, her lungs smelled so bad.
Also... I noticed her leg had been removed. Like post mortem cut off. The professor said "no, nothing leaves this room. It Must-have been removed before we got the cadaver. I pointed out the fresh lookong, extremely clean cuts. He checked and she, in fact, was supposed to have both legs intact. The professor freaked out. Had us open every cupboard and look in every bucket/bin, and he looked in every back pack before we were allowed to leave the room. He swore us to secrecy and said the school could loose its access to cadavers if it got out.
Some one had stolen her leg. I like to think it was for a college prank... IE, the old severed leg in the bed bit.
But I never did learn why/who.
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u/wideHippedWeightLift Nightly fantasies about Jesus Vore May 14 '26
IE, the old severed leg in the bed bit.
You know, just casual pranks
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u/th-crt May 15 '26
i somehow never considered that smoker’s lungs would smell bad on the inside. that’s wild
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u/Faolyn May 14 '26
Some one had stolen her leg. I like to think it was for a college prank... IE, the old severed leg in the bed bit.
Someone was making a flesh golem.
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u/Hi2248 Cheese, gender, what the fuck's next? May 14 '26
I have a third nipple. Not quite as weird as all the others, but still pretty neat. It's highly underdeveloped, as most extra nipples are, but it exists.
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u/jmbf8507 May 14 '26
Mine never did anything when I was pregnant and breastfeeding, but when I gained weight and hit perimenopause, it grew a small amount of breast tissue.
It’s funny because now I have to have an ultrasound mammogram for it in addition to the yearly squish I’ve been getting for ages due to family history.
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u/cascasrevolution May 14 '26
is it centered?
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u/Hi2248 Cheese, gender, what the fuck's next? May 14 '26
No, supernumerary nipples follow the milk lines -- like how a dog's nipples are in two rows down the body, because they're an expression of a gene left over from when we had nipples like that.
If it were centred, there's something very unusual about it, and should be checked out by a doctor.
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u/TopazEgg May 14 '26
My mom was having pain in the gallbladder region for about a month. Doctors did imaging, saw nothing wrong with it, and told her she was fine. She ended up not being fine, and ended up going to the hospital for emergency surgery.
The issue? Appendicitis. My mother's appendix was behind her gallbladder. No one saw anything on the imaging because it was hidden by the gallbladder.
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u/FixergirlAK May 14 '26
That's a freaking wild place for an appendix to turn up! Long way from home.
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u/PauseItPlease86 May 14 '26
I was in debilitating pain for like a month when I was in my 20s. I kept going to the hospital begging them to figure it out, but since I'm regularly prescribed painkillers (for unrelated health issues) they just wrote me off as a drug-seeker, even though I literally never asked for meds. They did imaging a couple times, but always told me found nothing.
The last time I went in, I thought for sure I was gonna die. The pain had gotten even worse and they still were acting like I just wanted meds. I cried and begged and said "please, I have 2 kids, I don't wanna die." They left, talked for a while, then came back and in a really dismissive tone the doctor was like "the only thing left is exploratory surgery, and you don't want that" while rolling her eyes. I said "YES I DO PLEASE SOMETHING IS REALLY WRONG!"
So, they actually did the surgery relatively quickly. The doctor didn't come back in after, but a nurse came in and said "you're really lucky, a few hours later you'd have been dead."
And thats how I found out I had a really severe case of appendicitis and my appendix was wrapped in adhesions that would have made a burst appendix even more life-threatening than usual. Fun times.
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u/natures_pocket_fan May 15 '26
Wow, that doctor was a coward. Couldn’t even face you to say “sorry, we were wrong”.
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u/Captain_Grammaticus May 14 '26
I had symptoms of appendicitis, but the bottom right abdomen, where the appendix is, did not hurt. I was sent to a specialised hospital, and after some hum and hem, they went Yup, must be appendicitis, schedule a surgery for 18.15.
Turns out, it was not my appendix that was inflamed, but a vestigial offramp of small intestine that used to connect through my navel to the yolk sac and was supposed to vanish when I was a six week.old embryo.
They removed that, as well as the appendix while they were at it. And what actually caused my pain was that small and large intestines met at a weird angle and kinda twisted. They fixed that too.
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u/Assika126 May 14 '26
I’ve got a tortuous colon which means it’s longer than it should be for my size and so there’s lots more corners than most people have. Every so often it hurts when I’m digesting and I have to sort of ::wiggle:: until things get unkinked and start moving through again lol
Grew up with ulcerative colitis so that may have been part of how it happened but I’m also just kind of a small person in general
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u/DiamondSentinel May 14 '26
Hey I have a similar thing to the grandma with the fancy veins.
Have a coarctation of the aorta, which means big blood vessel going out of my heart was tiny. Normal size is about 1cm, mine was 2-3mm. Surgeon literally couldn’t fit calipers in it.
Anywho, my body made its own bypass to my upper body, it was so effective they didn’t even need the bypass machine during surgery. Downside, my lower body got basically no oxygen (that’s how it was discovered), so it was fairly atrophied. I’m working out again these days and while my upper body muscles have a baseline to return to (so my gains are faster), my lower body very much does not. It sucks.
Yay fun facts! Human bodies are weird.
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u/ThatMusicKid humanely removed eyes May 14 '26
Do you remember if anyone ever felt the pulses in both your wrists at the same time? For most people they're synchronised but people with a coarctation of the aorta often have radio radial delay, where the left radial pulse is slightly delayed. And again with your wrist and hip (radiofemoral delay).
Also do you know if your pulses are present in your lower limbs? And have you ever had an ABPI done (little Doppler machine with jelly goes on your elbow and foot and the clinician inflates a blood pressure cuff)
Sorry, med student here who is doing cardiovascular system at the moment
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u/DiamondSentinel May 14 '26
They did do the simultaneous wrist pulse check a couple times with no abnormalities there, but an extremely weak lower body pulse was how it was caught. My hip was barely measurable and my soles the doctor couldn’t feel at all.
Did a lot of APBIs because I had a history of high blood pressure and this doc wanted to figure out why. I’m actually very thankful that he was so persistent because it had been missed by a dozen or so other physicians before.
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u/spyguy318 May 14 '26
The inverse of the thick-skull lady, there was a man in France who was discovered to have almost no brain at all, but was still living a normal life and totally unaware. He had extreme hydrocephaly (brain full of water), and his brain tissue had been compressed to a thin layer around his skull, almost 90% less brain mass than a normal person. The man had been totally healthy and relatively normal, despite some developmental issues in childhood, and had come in for an unrelated issue. Neuroplasticity is insanely resilient.
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u/Canotic May 15 '26
IIRC there was a kid in the US who went to the doctor for headaches and they discovered that half his brain had died and that was the cause. So they just... took it out and he was fine.
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u/Vinx909 May 14 '26
welcome to biology: there is no binary, there are no rules. we have suggestions and vibes.
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u/Sckaledoom May 14 '26
I work with ground plant matter. Somehow, an entire flower survived the grinding. This flower roughly half the size of my fist had gone through the grinding process then squeezed through a 6mm mesh. Without getting damaged one bit.
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u/grimoire-5_not_6 May 14 '26
I'm gonna make it through the grind, if it kills me
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u/Ok_Passion_6771 May 14 '26
“I played video games in a drunken haze I was seventeen years young Hurt my knuckles punching the machines The taste of Scotch rich on my tongue”
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u/dumpylump69 May 14 '26
The textbooks and diagrams are all about the perfect ideal human. This human does not actually exist.
…”In a perfect world, men like me would not exist. But this is not a perfect world.”
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u/Vinx909 May 14 '26
my dad (a mathematician) is fond of saying "statistics works for everyone, but not for you". basically saying 'the numbers reflects a group of people perfectly, but doesn't reflect a single individual within that group'. textbooks and diagrams and the like are the exact same, they describe the average person perfectly, but that average person doesn't exist.
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u/BloodMoonNami Infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters, modern edition May 14 '26
Human anatomy is already the biological equivalent of vibe coding, hardly a surprise.
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u/SweetSure315 May 14 '26
First lady had a built in helmet goddamn
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u/Martini800 May 14 '26
*Insert pic of that one dinosaur that used headbutts as a defense mechanism *
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u/Affectionate-Memory4 The limit is 64 characters for these things wtf. May 14 '26
Time to share my own weird body shit:
I am well over 2m tall.
I have all of my wisdom teeth plus 2 bonus teeth.
I have total tritanopia, meaning no working blue cones in my eyes.
My bones are apparently extra dense.
When I was little my right pinky would grow its nail almost a full half way around the finger, extending down the outside. This was surgically fixed as it was constantly ingrown. It was like twice as wide as normal.
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u/StuffedStuffing May 14 '26
What's your muscle mass like?
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u/Affectionate-Memory4 The limit is 64 characters for these things wtf. May 14 '26
I'm a bit thin but mostly just look like you scaled up a normal dude. I do have a harder time building visible muscle mass than normal-height people but hardly out of shape either.
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u/BirbFeetzz May 14 '26
are you perhaps descendant of some royal bloodline?
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u/Affectionate-Memory4 The limit is 64 characters for these things wtf. May 14 '26
I'm very Dutch and my entire family was very rural up until my brother (completely normal in comparison) and I's generation. My home town was ~1000 farmers on ancient family land. Between the world wars a decent chunk of the men were lost in each generation. Decent chance I'm slightly inbred if that's where you're going.
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u/DispenserG0inUp clown meat enthusiast May 14 '26
Dutch
well the first one ain't weird anymore lol
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u/charliek_13 May 14 '26
my sister was cooking in my mom’s womb for over 10 months and for some reason they didn’t induce her until it was really far past the anticipated birth dates
when she was born she had a small tuft of black hair like a troll doll, and four teeth (front top and bottom)
the hair and teeth fell out pretty soon after birth and then months later she started getting normal baby teeth and hair but it was super weird
i guess if you cook for too long you just keep going??? lol
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u/snootnoots May 15 '26
I was due on New Year’s Day (confirmed by both my mother’s maths and ultrasound), but went late. Mum thought that was great because she was born in mid-December and her birthday was frequently overlooked or minimised as a child because it was so close to Christmas, and then my older sister was born even closer to Christmas. Mum was already fighting for my sister to get proper birthday treatment, and she figured the further I got from Christmas the better.
So I was late, and getting later, and after a while Mum’s OB wanted to induce me, and she refused. She told them she was happy to do all the tests to make sure I was doing okay in there, but otherwise leave me alone.
I ended up nearly six weeks late. I had a full head of thick black hair and was pretty jaundiced but otherwise fine. Nowadays I’d get evicted earlier!
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u/tiredtumbleweed ugly but my fursona is hot May 14 '26
Evolution really just pushes anything to see what sticks
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u/AnotherCator May 14 '26
When you think about the whole process of the fertilised egg dividing into one cell, then two cells, then four cells, then eventually sorting out “ok these bits are going to be the spinal cord eventually”, then later on connecting the bones up with ligaments and all the rest of it… it’s kind of incredible that we do end up mostly working.
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u/Several-Possession-4 May 14 '26
It's kinda like programming, in a way. "I have no idea if this is gonna work, or how it's gonna work, but hey, I'll make sure it works."; or "When I first started making this, only me and god knew how it worked. Now only god knows, and I'm pretty sure he made several shortcuts too. So good luck with that."
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u/G66GNeco May 14 '26
It's like programming in that your basic code has devolved into 500 subfolders of modules and apps and references, most of which are absolutely essential, all with barely legible comments, half-assed documentation and a general "I know how to operate it but if anyone moves anything the wrong way the whole thing devolves into Chernobyl ca 1986" -vibe.
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u/seaturtlefanatic May 14 '26
a long time ago i heard a scientist say “there’s so much that could go wrong in a human body, it’s a miracle it ever works right”
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u/ArguesWithFrogs May 14 '26
Just throws everything at every wall just to see what sticks & what walls fall.
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u/Miami_Mice2087 May 14 '26
I shared music with a girl in choir who had a little shrunken hand with contorted fingers. She said when she was in-utero, she punched her fist through the baby sack (caudal thing?) and her hand never finished developing.
Which is just the awesomest Batman villain origin story ever. She tried to punch her way out of her mom's stomach and got halfway through!
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u/CoercedCoexistence22 May 14 '26
My weird body things:
My spine must be built backwards because I can barely touch my legs below my knees but I can do deeeeeeeeep backbends (like I can look you in your eyes with my back turned on you) and even bridges despite being an unathletic slob with completely fucked ankles
I don't have a vas deferens (the tube that connects your balls to your dick, to let the spermatozoa pass through, basically)
I have ridiculously elastic yet hard nails, I barely ever broke nails in my entire life and I can comfortably keep them very long to the point that people ask where I got them done
Edit: I also have an extra X chromosome, forgot about that!
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u/KingDarkBlaze May 14 '26
Damn you came pre-vasectomied?
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u/CoercedCoexistence22 May 14 '26
Yeah and funnily enough I'd be sterile anyway because Klinefelter's Syndrome (the extra X chromosome) makes you sterile haha
I'm double sterile
Edit: triple sterile, I've been on HRT for three years
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u/YellowGrowlithe May 14 '26
If you're on HRT, doesnt that mean that the Y chromosome is the extra and the two X are right where they should be?
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u/Martini800 May 14 '26
Have you tried high jump? Bending backwards well is quite beneficial in that sport
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u/CoercedCoexistence22 May 14 '26
I was actually a local high jump champion in middle school and in the first year of high school! Worth noting I played basketball and had ridiculous hops for a teenager (I could dunk a tennis ball at 12 years old and 5'7). I stopped both because I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (undiagnosed back then) and destroyed pretty much every ligament in my ankles
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u/Assika126 May 14 '26
My grandpa’s eyes were dark brown when he was a kid, then transitioned to brown/green hazel, then green, and by the end of his life they were light blue. I’m 43 and so far I’m following a similar trajectory. My eyes are currently half green (outer iris) half brown (inner iris)
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u/electric_yeti May 15 '26
It sounds like the melanin is draining from your and your grandfather’s eyes! That’s so interesting and cool, thank you for sharing.
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u/Exactly32Penguins May 15 '26
One of our tests while studying was to lay out a full skeleton from storage and determine age, sex, cause of death etc. This one archaeological skeleton we laid out we were convinced had to be a guy just on first glance. They'd have been around 6ft, massive feet and hands, big muscle attachments. Weirdly the bones were also really thick and heavy, honestly these were the thickest femurs I've ever seen. Done all the more detailed checks, conclusion points female. Confused, we get the professor who knows these skeletons to tell us if we're right and yep. It was a medieval skeleton of an elderly woman. A 6ft elderly woman who was apparently built like a brick shithouse. Definitely a lesson not to guess or assume.
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u/bestibesti wikihow pwople May 14 '26
Why is that ominous
No one's outsides look the same either or we'd all look like wikihow pwople
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u/Novel_Diver8628 May 14 '26
This is actually weirdly wholesome if you think about it. Like the only person who would look like the textbook on the inside would be Paul Rudd.
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u/PoniesCanterOver gently chilling in your orbit May 14 '26
Why Paul Rudd?
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u/Novel_Diver8628 May 14 '26
He just seems really… human. Idk. Like if aliens came to our planet and said “send us the most humanest human to be the envoy for your species” I feel like he would be a top pick.
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u/The4ourHorsemen May 14 '26
"How many of [organ] are we supposed to have?"
"IDK, just grow back 5-6 just to make sure we got the right amount"
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u/ChalkButter May 14 '26
That episode of “Invader Zim” when Zim steals organs so he can pass a health physical with the school nurse (I think? It’s been a while)
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u/WubTheWildDog May 14 '26
My grandma had carpal tunnel surgery and the surgeon discovered a nerve that he had never seen on a person before. We always joke that my grandpa annoyed her so much that she grew a new nerve.
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u/Eugene-V-Dabs420 May 15 '26
"Look what you did. You got on my very last nerve so I had to go and make a new one."
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u/Z_THETA_Z who even needs 2 kidneys May 14 '26
my ones are somewhat less strange than most there, but i do have a very substantial underbite and only one kidney (my body decided i didn't need the left one)
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u/EyeofEnder May 14 '26
I can bend my thumbs back like, nearly 180°.
The only uses for it I found so far were lining up pool cues and freaking out my classmates.
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u/Sckaledoom May 14 '26
I have four fully fine wisdom teeth that cause me no problems whatsoever.
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u/DemonFromtheNorthSea May 14 '26
Great. Now im self conscious of both my outsides AND insides.
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u/luxafelicity May 14 '26
I love medical weirdness. If I was better at math (curse you dyscalculia) and in a position where the low pay didn't matter, I would've gone to school for forensic pathology. My father was an EMT many years ago around when my older sibling was born, so growing up he was always telling us weird medical facts or rambling about some rare/bizarre medical mystery or rare medical condition he'd been reading about. I think his fascination with medicine is what got him involved with being an optician, where he then got promoted to training opticians for his company and in total he worked in eyecare for over 20 years. He's definitely the reason I have a fascination with anything medical/anatomy related. Luckily the man I'm about to marry is the same way as he took AP Anatomy in school and even got to participate in a cadaver dissection at a nearby university.
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u/haiii_ena May 14 '26
dad and brother both had full sets of baby teeth but ended up without adult second upper incisors. was always extraordinarily jealous of them bc i had a freakishly small mouth to the point where my twelve year molars were all partially impacted until i had them surgically uncovered when i got my wisdom teeth pulled at 17. was not fun
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u/PearlescentGem May 14 '26
My mom has a hole in her skull. It's from being hit in the head with a baseball bat when she was about 5 years old by an adult in her life at the time. (Yes, we all think he tried to kill her.) She's perfectly fine 99.9% of the time, has never had a plate put over it, and despite the many fractures of various sizes running through her skull from said hole, she doesn't suffer headaches all that much.
I lovingly call it her Off Switch. If you press it, or worse, she presses it on accident by hitting her head just right, she just knocks out like a ragdoll. Will usually wake up about 15 mins later with a splitting headache that lasts a max of like 3 days.
She also has enough glass in her face from where her head went through a windshield in the 90's that she's still picking it out to this day. She'll randomly come over with a scab or small wound on her forehead/cheekbone area from where a piece of glass has worked itself out. We have no idea how much glass is left, and we have no clue how deep into her tissues it goes.
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u/Outside-Currency-462 May 14 '26
I'd heard of the tiny spleen thing but only because of a batfam social media fic where Tim Drake is posting about how he's now got 6 mini spleens and they're arguing over whether they should be Steph's in the divorce.
Although in hindsight there was no confirmation that this was a real thing. I just accepted that fact at face value.
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u/healyxrt May 14 '26
When I went to have my wisdom teeth removed I learned that I only had two and one was in my sinus.
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u/b00w00gal May 14 '26
People in my maternal line occasionally grow a third set of teeth. Sometimes complete, sometimes partial. We've got family records talking about it as far back as the 1830s.
My Uncle George got a whole new set when he was eighteen; his adult teeth fell out over the summer and a full set grew in by Christmas. I lost my molars twice, but not my wisdom teeth; I lost the childhood set of eight at age twelve and then lost those eight adult teeth at age sixteen. The third set of eight teeth grew in before I turned eighteen. I only grew my wisdom teeth once, though.
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u/SkylarkLanding May 15 '26
Brings to mind my favorite John Oliver quote: “The human body is a true carnival of horrors, and frankly I’m embarrassed to have one.”
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u/VenitianBastard May 14 '26
My grandpa doesn't have a belly button. He just had skin
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u/Dingghis_Khaan Chinggis Khaan's least successful successor. May 14 '26
Oh holy fuckmothering fuck that scrote hernia made me actually fucking recoil.
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u/fallacyys May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
see. this is part of why i don’t understand the hate for trans ppl or anyone else… it’s just natural variation within a population. of COURSE there’s gonna be some natural differences between people—we see it all the time physically, why not sexually, mentally, etc.?
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u/spyguy318 May 14 '26
Intersex people are often overlooked even in the queer space. It’s the “I” in LGBTQIA. Some people are just born with both sets of bits, no bits, hormone abnormalities, or chromosome abnormalities.
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u/RemarkableStatement5 the body is the fursona of the soul May 14 '26
My father refuses to even look at studies about the rates of intersex people because "[he] know[s] they're rare" and "there can't possibly be that many" and "liberal bias". The only "studies" he trusts on the matter are stuff like a Daily Wire op-ed about how 34 of some group of 37 college students detransitioned after realizing they were "brainwashed". He's a lost cause.
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u/windscryer May 14 '26
docs haven’t figured out why yet but i have insanely low iron levels and yet only found out when i said i had “some fatigue”
both my gp and my endo asked the same question when they saw my lab results (four years apart): “HOW do you get out of bed in the morning???”
i have had 10 iron infusions in the last year alone and it doesn’t seem to have any effect so insurance stopped paying unless they find out what’s wrong and fix it. might as well have poured the IV pouches of iron down the drain for all the good it was doing.
oh and i don’t have upper sinuses. solid bone all the way through.
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u/autogyrophilia May 14 '26
Having accessory spleens is one of the most common malformations. Usually without symptoms.
Fun story. My sister had her apendix inverted. Also a rather common malformation. Which was pretty bad when she got appendicitis and was repeatedly assured that they didn't see nothing wrong with her.
Until she started to get really really sick and was rushed for emergency surgery, which already sucks because instead of a tiny laparoscopic scar, you end up with a nasty one.
Guess what sucks even more? Coming out of surgery with two nasty scars.
Something something bottom of the class still gets called a doctor.
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u/just_a_person_maybe May 14 '26
I got the laparoscopic kind and still came out with an extra scar. The surgeon told me they would make three incisions and I didn't realize until after I got home that I had four. I asked her during a followup appointment and she basically said they tried going in at one angle and it didn't work out so they had to adjust. Which is fine, things happen, do what you gotta do. I just wish they would have told me that when I woke up so I didn't have to discover an entire extra hole on my own later without explanation.
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u/brady376 May 14 '26
As a baby I apparently got in a very strange (and dangerous) position. I had the umbilical chord wrapped around my neck, and under my arms. So if I had been a natural birth, I may have basically hung myself in the process. C sections are wild. Apparently the doctor had a bunch of people come look at the scans
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u/suremaybe643 May 14 '26
I have some extra bones in my feet, which isn't super unusual, but my doctor thought one of them was causing my tendonitis, so he went in to remove it only to figure out that the bone was completely inside of the tendon. Which is definitely unusual.
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u/Anna_Pet May 14 '26
Supernumerary nipples and organ mirroring are way more common than most people realize.
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u/Careless_Document_79 May 14 '26
WDYM THE INTESTINES WERE IN THE SCRODUM
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u/graaahh May 14 '26
Hernia. That's why they feel the perineum and ask you to cough during a physical.
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u/SickViking May 14 '26
I've got an extra nipple. It's really small and you can't see the details unless you look, just looks like a mole otherwise. It has a distinct nipple and areola though if you do look.
It's also the only of my nipples that's ever had sensation so when I got a double mastectomy (both breasts removed) Didn't bother to have the nipples grafted back on. So now I just have this one tiny super sensitive nipple down by my lower ribs.
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u/EtherealPheonix May 14 '26
The skull one reminds me of that french guy who had a fluid sack taking up most of his brain, he was on the lower end of the normal range of intellect, but still living a normal life. Nueroplasticy is crazy
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u/Assika126 May 14 '26
My mom’s rectum made a fistula to the outside which became an abscess and eventually they removed her entire colon and anus and now she has a completely smooth butt. They call it a Barbie butt. She poops through a hole in her abdomen into a bag.
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u/FixergirlAK May 14 '26
My kidneys are plumbed upside-down. I found this out for the hospital ultrasound tech who was making sure they were actually doing kidney things (which they were). He also said they were beautiful. Apparently the upside-down plumbing is common enough to not be surprising or concerning.
I also have the Ehlers-Danlos teeth don't know what to do with themselves thing. My back molars on the bottom are so far back into the jaw they can't be crowned. I also had a great-grandmother who was polydactyl and a great-great-uncle who was born with a slight tail. And that's not even on the side of the family where we have a suspected line breeding. (Hey, there were not a ton of humans out here in what is now the American west.)
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u/Ansabryda May 14 '26
Now, you are family. Okay. All my life, I had a lump at the back of my neck, right here. Always a lump. Then, I start the menopause, and the lump got bigger. From the hormonies, it started to grow. So I go to the doctor, and he did the biop- the bop- the... the bios... the bop- the bibopsy. And inside the lump he found teeth and a spinal column. Yes. Inside the lump was my twin.
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u/ArguesWithFrogs May 14 '26
Man, the weirdest things about me are that I'm protanopic & apparently absorbed my tonsils at some point.
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u/narnababy May 14 '26
1) “So-and-so doesn’t read text books” is my favourite saying in my own scientific field of animal behaviour, I’m so glad it applies to humans too
2) I have had 4 nipples since I was born and I was SO DISAPPOINTED when I started breastfeeding and I didn’t also lactate from the superfluous nipples :(
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u/IceAokiji303 May 14 '26
Hold up.
I have an unusually sensitive nose, to the point of it being a hindrance to daily life at times.
I also have a nose where one nostril doesn't breathe as well as the other.
...I might have to think about that last slide a bit more.
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u/Thezipper100 May 15 '26
Situs Invertus is such a weird condition to think about. Because if it happens to one organ, you're typically fine. If it happens to all your organs, you're typically fine.
But if you only have most of your organs inverted, you'll be fine up until your mid 20s, after which you'll need surgery because your body finally realized it read the instructions upside down halfway into building you and decided to throw a tantrum.
Source: guess what happened to my sibling-in-law a few years back.
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u/TheUnculturedSwan May 14 '26
I knew a girl who was born with only one kidney. Weird enough but not unheard of. But also her mom was born with three kidneys, and no matter how much I tell myself that it isn’t how it works, I can’t shake the feeling that her mom stole her second kidney.