Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Studying the liver in an obsolete text

I read far more about the liver than I’d ever need to know last night, and studied Gray’s Anatomy for about an hour, finding out what hooks up to what. The problem with Gray’s is that it was written about a million years ago, so it doesn’t talk about modern surgery – just old fashioned sawing and forking apart a cadaver. Things haven’t changed much there, but it would be nice for more detailed medical information. I have an encyclopedia from 1972, but that doesn’t exactly give me the latest in surgical techniques.

It doesn’t matter too much. I worked my worry into a frenzy last night, thinking my spleen would explode in my sleep, and when I got to the doctor today, he said I was fine. I’m glad I don’t have hepatitis or something, but I was hoping for some simple, treatable condition that would go away after a prescription or two, and allow me to go back to my previous diet of Cokes and Quarter Pounders. No such luck.

Why is everybody suddenly lactose intolerant? Why weren’t people on the Old West lactose intolerant? Did they start adding stuff to milk to make it worse? Have cows mutated over the last 5 years? Has there ever been a US Astronaut that was lactose intolerant? Did they drink something else in space, like maybe a soy milk? I wonder about that.