Читать книгу The Last Body Part - Sarajabe Woolf - Страница 7

ONE

One Man’s Trash

On November 19, 1849, a male rhino tripped and fell at the London Zoo. He hit the ground hard and cracked a rib, which stabbed one of his lungs. The next day, the zookeeper saw him try to vomit. Blood and mucus shot out of his nose and mouth. A week later, the rhino died.

How would you get rid of a dead two-ton rhino? The zookeeper got rid of him the same way we’d get rid of an old couch or fridge. He offered the rhino for free. “You haul him, he’s yours,” the zookeeper said.

You know that saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? In this case, one man’s dead rhino was another man’s … I’m tempted to say rhinestone. But this was true treasure to the right man, a free two-ton diamond. That man was the scientist and professor Richard Owen, head of the Hunterian Museum in London.

Richard Owen had urged the London Zoo to buy the rhino ten years earlier, even though rhinos don’t come cheap, so he was sad that the animal died at a younger age than expected. But he jumped at the chance to dissect any dead animal. He would measure all the organs. He’d study how the pieces of the animal fit together, as if it were a puzzle. Then he’d write a scientific paper on what he’d learned.

If you’ve ever dissected a worm, you know it can be hard to find their tiny body parts, like the brain. Imagine Richard Owen dissecting the rhino. Organs that get lost in a worm are huge in a two-ton animal. He even found a gland that no one had ever noticed before—not in any animal, not in any human. The gland was the size of a plump green pea. I saw this gland at the Hunterian Museum in London, preserved in a jar.

Where My Story Begins

My road to the rhino gland started at a free health fair. At 6:30 one Saturday morning, I left home without eating only to stand in a long, long line. Who were all those people, awake and dressed at that hour? I inched to the front of the line. There, a young man in a crisp white coat tried to take my blood. Not until his third sharp jab into my arm did his syringe fill with a deep red.

A month later the results of the blood test came in the mail. I tore into the envelope as if it held a report card that would reveal my bright future or punish me for my past. How did my body do this year? Numbers that were too big or too small were lined up on the far right. Some I don’t worry about. I’m not going to stop eating butter and ice cream just because a number is high. But I saw something new on that list: high calcium. That’s good, right? I eat yogurt every day and swallow calcium pills because calcium builds bones. Didn’t seem like a bad thing to have high calcium.

“Don’t worry. It’s not cancer,” my doctor said when I showed him the results of the test. Of course not, I thought. It’s just calcium. How little I knew. He pulled a book off a shelf and opened it to a line drawing of the inside of a neck. Then he pointed to a small oval shape filled in with the color red. And, for the first time, I heard the name of the gland that Richard Owen found in his rhino: parathyroid.

A bad name, if there ever was one. The Greek word para means beside or near. So parathyroid means near the thyroid. True, these glands are near the thyroid. But this is like naming your son for the boy next door, calling him Para-Bob or Para-Sam. The name made sense to someone. Maybe because blood vessels connect the thyroid and parathyroid, like water and sewer pipes that serve both your house and the one next door. Still, every other organ in the body gets its own name. And never mind that a number of lofty words start with para, like paramedic. To me, para sounds like trouble. Think parasite or paranoia. See what I mean? So for now, I’ll give the parathyroid gland a nickname—the PT gland.

Built-In Spare Parts

Most of us have four PT glands. They’re tucked behind the thyroid, arranged in pairs on each side of the windpipe in an upper and a lower set. Often the size of a small grain of rice, they can look pear-shaped or flat like a lentil. Their color varies from a grayish white to a reddish brown. Fat can make them look yellow. In any case, their color is not the same as the thyroid’s, which makes the smooth, shiny glands easier for a surgeon to see.

The glands control calcium in the blood. If the level is too low, they secrete a hormone that tells the bones to release calcium. If the level is too high, the glands sit back and wait for it to drop. Just like a heater with a thermostat.

The four glands all do the same thing. So one can go bad—and by that I mean it can have a benign tumor—and it’s no big deal to take it out. We’re born with built-in spare parts. A great design, except for one glitch. The four glands work like old Christmas lights. One burnt bulb makes the whole string go dark. In our bodies, one bad PT gland makes the other three shut down. Worse than that, the gland with the tumor goes into overdrive. It no longer responds to small changes in the level of blood calcium. Instead, the gland shovels the PT hormone into the blood whether it needs calcium or not. Blood calcium stays high, as my health-fair test showed. And the bones weaken as they keep sloughing off calcium. Surgery to remove the bad gland is the only way to stop the body from turning into a creature without a skeleton.

A Bat in a Cave

My doctor sent me to a cancer center for a scan of my neck to find which of my four PT glands had gone bad. First, someone inserted an IV feed into my arm and injected me with radioactive slime. Next, I was led to a room filled with scratched machines painted the colors of old gym lockers. A technician hauled in a heavy lens on a beat-up cart. The lens looked like a light for a stage or a TV studio, but bigger. When she tried to change the lens on my machine, it jammed. The process was awkward, like kicking the legs shut on a heavy folding table. The place could have been a set for Star Wars—everything both old and space-age new. An alien could have come in for a scan of an organ vital for X-ray vision or for beaming a message to Mars.

When a second technician tried to strap down my arms, I protested. She believed me when I said I’d lie still. I kept my word, but it was hard because a large camera hovered over my face and neck for a long time. During the scan, the technician asked once if I was OK. When I said “Yes,” my voice bounced back too fast from the camera, as if I were a bat in a cave, too close to a wall. At one point I swallowed, and my throat rose just enough to touch something metal.

I moved to a second camera that would photograph my neck from a different angle for a full twenty minutes. Flat plates moved in an arc around my head. On the sides, they bumped my shoulders, as if the space were too crowded for both of us.

A third technician pulled out my IV and told me to put pressure on a cotton pad over the wound. Then she led me to another room, left, and didn’t return. Feeling abandoned after all the earlier attention, I stepped into the hallway. A fourth technician, one I hadn’t seen before, gave me a puzzled look. I said, “I guess I’m done,” and walked away.

To Boldly Go

Most body parts are stuck in their assigned spots; the brain in the head, the heart in the chest, the stomach in the stomach. Before birth, the PT glands are not stuck—they’re more like free agents. They start growing near the tube that connects the nose and mouth. About the fifth week in the life of a fetus, the glands get restless. Then they break away and head south.

Another gland, the thymus, heads down at the same time. The PT glands should stop at the thyroid. But sometimes the two lower glands keep moving with the thymus. They boldly go where PT glands aren’t meant to go. This doesn’t create problems. It’s just a bit odd. In one study of fifty-four cases of PT glands on the loose, twelve sets were found between the lungs. For this tiny gland, that’s a long way to go. If your stomach moved an equivalent distance, you’d find it past your feet.

A sea captain with the U.S. Merchant Marine, Charles Martell, had the first known case of a bad runaway PT gland. Between 1918 and 1926, he had eight bone fractures and shrank seven inches, signs of a PT problem. Surgeons opened up his neck six times. But they couldn’t find the bad gland—like the gas station attendant who opened the front hood of my VW and couldn’t find the engine.

Charles read anatomy books in his free time. He decided he had a tumor in his chest. In the seventh operation, surgeons found the bad PT gland right where Charles said it was. The machines that found my tumor wouldn’t have known where to find his.