Click the link below the picture
.
It was the first day of spring break in 1992 in Phoenix, and 12-year-old Heather Smith was excited for her family’s upcoming ski trip.
But before Smith and her family had even packed their snow pants, she realized she didn’t feel good. “I woke up feeling just a little bit nauseous, and I wasn’t sure why. Throughout the course of the day, I started to feel worse and worse and started to develop pain in the abdomen,” she says.
By about midafternoon, her father took her to urgent care. She ended up getting emergency surgery to have her appendix out.
Smith still has a small scar from the appendectomy. And after the surgery, she found herself intrigued by the part of her body she had so suddenly lost. “It inspired me to wonder: Why do we have this weird little organ in the first place? What does it do? Why does it get inflamed?”
Smith grew up to be a professor of anatomy at Midwestern University and editor-in-chief of a journal called The Anatomical Record. And all these decades later, Smith has made a mark in the field by studying the very organ that threw off her family’s vacation plans in 1992.
She acknowledges that the appendix has a bad rap as a useless organ that can cause you pain and require emergency surgery. “But it turns out recent research shows it does have functions that can help us,” she says.
NPR’s Short Wave spoke to Smith about what the appendix is good for and how a future where appendicitis can be prevented or treated without emergency surgery could be on the way.
What and where is the appendix?
The type of appendix that humans and some primates and rodents have looks like a little worm. It’s about the size of your pinky finger, and it projects off the cecum, which is the first part of the large intestine.
.
As an evolutionary anatomist, Heather Smith studies the fossil record of extinct species. A sudden appendectomy as a child made her curious about what the appendix is for and why it gets inflamed. Heather Smith
.
.
Click the link below for the article:
.
__________________________________________
James' World 2 
Leave a comment