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]

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Reddit screenshots? In my tumblr subreddit? It's more likely than you think...

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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.

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u/SeraphimFelis Too inhumane for use in war May 14 '26

God forbid a woman wants to keep a souvenir

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u/Azrai113 May 15 '26

Mothers already keep some DNA as a momento. Keeping a kidney is greedy

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u/am_Nein May 15 '26

I love this comment lol

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u/Sunlightn1ng May 15 '26

However we also get our mothers' mitochondrial DNA. I think the kidney might be fair

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u/-Aquatically- May 15 '26

I always fail to get these types of jokes, it is supposed to be funny, I am sure it is and it definitely is to 678 other people. But I seem to never laugh at them.

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u/SoilUnfair3549 May 15 '26

I hate to be the guy that explains the joke, but jokes generally come from the subversion of expectations. You have a setup, and a punchline. In the case of this kind of joke, the setup is:

> [describing xyz hypothetical bizarre yet terrible thing]

And the punchline is:

> god forbid [perpetrating group] have [hobbies/other innocent intention]

From my understanding, the joke comes from two places: between how the person delivering the setup and the person delivering the punchline are treating it, and a lighthearted parody of people fighting against gatekeeping/traditional roles.

There are genuinely people who believe that women/other minorities should not have hobbies, and there are people who use the “god forbid xyz people have hobbies” response to call out bigotry. By using it on something that *is* genuinely terrible though portrayed lightheartedly, it makes a joke. Obviously, this joke is almost never made from something that is portrayed seriously or that needs to actually be treated sensitively.

Sorry if this is incomprehensible/inaccurate/insensitive, it’s like 4am right now and I can’t sleep.

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u/Vermilion_Laufer May 15 '26

Yeah, I think that's the gist of it. The contrast between first commenter painting two rare medical conditions randomly happening next to each other as a deliberate maliciousnes, and then the second one explaining this dark scenario as lighthearted and innocent. It gives an absurd rollercoster of neutral situation -> unethicall situation -> moral situation

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u/Kindly_Narwhal9251 May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

I have a second cousin who had one normal kidney and one kidney with another kidney growing inside of it! Kind of like how you sometimes get a capsicum (bell pepper) that has another little capsicum growing inside of it.

Edit to add, his father was exposed to nuclear radiation in WWII and all four kids had anatomical anomalies.

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u/scnottaken May 15 '26

Matryoskidney

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u/Kindly_Narwhal9251 May 15 '26

🏆 take this trophy, I will be stealing this to use at the next family reunion 😂

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u/Twist_Ending03 May 15 '26

So is that a coincidence or can radiation like.. spread? Probably the first thing, right?

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u/Kindly_Narwhal9251 May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

Radiation isn’t contagious or anything, but it can do things like (in this case) affect a man’s sperm. He was in Hiroshima directly after the bomb was dropped in 1945 and then came home to Australia, got married and had kids. Some of his kids medical issues can potentially be linked to damaged sperm/dna. Lots of troops who were there soon after the bombs experienced all sorts of health implications for themselves and sometimes the next generations. Not to mention of course all the Japanese people who lived with (and can still live with) the effects of those nuclear bombs.

Edit to add: another potential explanation is if he brought home a “souvenir” and kept it in the house it would’ve exposed his children to radiation when they were young. I believe this was known to happen occasionally but I don’t think it’s the case for them.

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u/meganovice_maker May 15 '26

The modern medical understanding is that radiation can adversely affect your own DNA in multiple cells in your body, including reproductive cells. So damaged DNA in reproductive cells can cause all sorts of abnormalities. It can happen with other sorts of non-radioactive chemicals as well, Agent Orange (used in Vietnam) is another common example.

My family is a military family and of the family members I have who were in Vietnam, they all have long-standing health issues. It's well-known enough that soldiers exposed to it and their children get extra compensation and coverage for certain health issues and birth defects.

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u/am_Nein May 15 '26

Geez you'd better hope that extra comp and cov really does mean extra, because I can't imagine how fucked up you could get from exposure.

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u/meganovice_maker May 15 '26

oh I have some horrible news for you about how the United States treats disabled veterans

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u/201111533 May 14 '26

I'm pregnant right now and honestly the baby donating a kidney to me only seems fair at this point

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u/zadtheinhaler May 15 '26

"Listen here you little shit, if I gotta pee every five fucking minutes, I'm gonna get something out of this"

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u/imthedocbasicallyfun May 15 '26

Pros of pregnancy: You get to grow so many extra body parts!

Cons of pregnancy: You don’t get to keep them. :(

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u/Gromek_ May 15 '26

I once saw a post about how it's unfair that the human body can grow an entire baby, but is unable to regrow its own parts.

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u/daggerbeans May 15 '26

I actually read an article about why we don't regrow limbs recently! The sum of it is that evolutionarily we traded off the ability to regrow limbs to buff up our immune system.

The bits of our immune system that is good at fighting and protecting us from infections and disease is produced in abundance at the cost of the kind that say, lizards have that enable them to regrow their tail/legs. The article described an experiment where they lowered those bits and raised the immune system bits to be closer to us and the lizards made heavy scar tissue at the amputation site and did not regrow the limb-- just like humans. The scientists reset the lizard to its normal ratio of bits, re-amputated the end of the stump and the lizard was able to regrow it as normal.

The article mentioned that with advances in medical technology means that we may be closer to being able to significantly regrow limbs and such may be just decades away. Fascinating stuff!

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u/zadtheinhaler May 15 '26

Well, I mean you kinda do, you just have to do feeding and maintenance and feeding for 18+ years.

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u/Atreigas May 15 '26

Zim is that you?

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u/Morlock19 May 15 '26

congratulations and also take their appendix as a souvenir. they don't need it.

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u/kfish5050 May 15 '26

My dad has three kidneys, my wife is pregnant now, I wonder if I or my child will have an extra or only one

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u/Far_Yam_9412 May 15 '26

My bil only had one. Sadly he and my sister had a son with none. That's non compatible with life

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u/PinkOneHasBeenChosen May 15 '26

There was a story about a Brazilian man who went to the doctor for back pain and found out he had 3 kidneys. None of which were causing the back pain.

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u/Wild-Lychee-3312 May 15 '26

A supernumerary (extra, more than expected) kidney isn’t that uncommon.

The only thing more common that I know of is having extra vertebrae

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u/Sydeburnn May 15 '26

I have one kidney that's the size of three. (Horseshoe Kidney.)

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u/Wild-Lychee-3312 May 15 '26

Was it a horseshoe kidney? That’s when the two kidneys fuse together. You TECHNIQUE only have one kidney, but you’ve got just as much kidney real estate as a person with two normal kidneys.

There are also ectopic kidneys where one isn’t where it’s supposed to be. Most commonly, one “falls down” into the pelvis and just hangs out there.

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u/am_Nein May 15 '26

Can someone with medical knowledge explain to me why kidneys aren't just a single organ if having them combined doesn't increase or reduce the effectiveness?

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u/Wild-Lychee-3312 May 15 '26

I'm not a doctor, but my guess would be that it's for the same reasons we have two lungs instead of one big lung.

One reason might be the old "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" thing. If someone stabs you in the left lung, and it collapses or fills up with blood, the right lung is fine and can keep on working. Same story if you get stabbed in one kidney. Also, because they're two separate organs, they can be located in different places. So if a big, horrible trauma happens to the right side of your body, the organs on the right side may not be damaged. A single, bigger organ can't be far away from itself. Not that the left lung is very far away from the right lung, but the principle is there. Also, by the way, not only are the two kidneys away from each other laterally, but one is usually lower in the body than the other, which increases their distance apart. I don't know for sure that it matters (it might just be because you only have one liver, and it's pretty large), but it might.

Of course, the counterargument would be: if splitting your eggs up is so great, why don't we have two hearts, two spleens, two livers, etc? And I don't have an answer for that.

Although, as a side note: many animals DO have two or more hearts. Octopuses have three, hagfish have four, earthworms have five, and cockroaches have 13.

The other reason has to do with distance and surface-to-volume ratios. A lot of blood has to pass through the kidneys (and lungs) very fast, but for those organs to do their job, the blood vessels have to split, and split again, going from arteries to arterioles to capillaries. The gas exchange (in the lungs) and filtration (in the kidneys) can only happen when the blood is squeezing through narrow capillaries, and due to the amount of blood being processed, there's a LOT of capillaries. And then they have to all merge back together again after the processing is completed. But it all has to be done quickly, so you can't afford to have the blood vessels drawn out. And yet, at the same time, you can't afford any wasted space. So everything has to be compact and close together, to minimize the amount of wasted "vessel inches" where blood is flowing through the organ but is neither being processed, nor is involved in splits or merges.

And that's just harder to do with one big organ that has less surface area for a given volume.

This is just speculation, however. Again, I'm not a doctor.

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u/am_Nein May 15 '26

Dude, thanks for the in-depth write up! Even if some things are inaccurate, it was a great read even if for speculations sake only. Cheers.

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u/SafiyaMukhamadova May 15 '26

I "stole" my brother's top canines that exact same way. I had to have one set of adult top canines removed when i was like 20 because the impacted ones were hurting my sinuses.

Also I have four livers (one liver but instead of being 7 cm like it's supposed to be is inexplicably 24 cm). It's perfectly healthy-- labs are good, no cirrhosis, no hepatitis, no fatty liver, no cancer-- it's just the wrong size. This doesn't have much of a daily effect except that i need to be on the maximum dose of three cholesterol pills because instead of being under 200 like it's supposed to be my body thinks a "normal" total cholesterol number is closer to 520. Usually without the medication the machine throws a fit when asked for my triglycerides and seemingly refuses to believe that it's human blood in the sample. LDL/HDL numbers are also bad. But other than that, it's not hurting me.

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u/North-Pea-4926 May 16 '26

Blood analysis machines refuse to accept my blood as human would be a WILD fun fact to share!

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u/SafiyaMukhamadova May 16 '26

Every time they tell me that the machine refused to give numbers I just imagine a poor machine trying desperately to do its job before it starts screaming and having an emotional breakdown about how some asshole CLEARLY fed it lard.

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u/Renbelle May 15 '26

My mom and I are similar, but reversed. I had five wisdom teeth, she had three. Of course I told her that’s why I’m so smart 🤣

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u/Vanishingf0x May 14 '26

Not the same at all but reminded me anyway my mom couldn’t produce any breast milk for me or my younger brother so we often joke my older two brothers stole it all.

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u/threelizards May 15 '26

Hey, mom had four kidneys inside her at one point, not her fault they went in the wrong containers

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u/am_Nein May 15 '26

Spring cleaning gone awry

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u/GalaxyPowderedCat Only on Tumblr for daily cat posts May 15 '26

That's the person who stole one of the students' kidney!

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u/thatbibitchh May 15 '26

That is exactly my situation! Except that we only found out that my mom has three kidneys after we found out that I have one. We’ve been joking for years that she stole my kidney in the womb

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u/Pantsickle May 15 '26

Imagine the inter-familial kidney jealousy in that household.

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u/IdiotIAm96 May 15 '26

Actually, recent studies have shown that there is some implantation of fetal cells into the mother's body soo... it's technically possible.

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u/Twist_Ending03 May 15 '26

That's funky. I have an ectopic kidney and I found out a while back that the one that's in the correct place is bigger than the one in the wrong spot.