From the Ridiculous to the Even More Ridiculous

Once, around a dinner table when everyone was remarking how delicious the dinner was, I said, "It tastes so good I hate to swallow," which pretty much exhausted my knowledge of digestion until just the past month.

Food, and eating, as far as I was concerned, pretty much began with biting and chewing, and that was it. Oh, sure, I knew what happened later, but didn't really much care, and while I must have learned something about the digestive tract and its functions in health or biology classes, I wasn't much of a student. Whatever my teachers had endeavored to impart to me never lasted, and I never gave it any thought after the test.

But that blissful ignorance wasn't to last.

Now that I think I'm all done writing about subserosal myomas, at least for now, I'm back to the more exciting topics of rectal bleeding and H. pylori. While I don't know anything about those, either, they're at least things that can affect me, personally. And, for the first time in my life, I have something other than myself to think about while I go about my business in the morning.

Like I said, I must have learned at some time what the intestines do, but I honestly had no idea what different things were done in the small and large intestines. As far as I was concerned, it was all just moving stuff along and grabbing what it could in the way of nutrients.

Now, I know a little better.

How exciting it is for me, now, to have worries about things that never before concerned me! Although I've yet to reach a point where I inspect my shit, and hope I never do, I can no longer take my morning dump as casually as I once did a ride in a car. When you're thinking about pistons and valves, it's hard not to listen for any little sign that something may be amiss in your engine, and it's now approaching that point with my intestines.

As far as I can tell, I'm still getting plenty of nutrition out of the things I eat. They also still taste good, unless I somehow screw up, but now that I know the large intestine mostly regulates water after the small has grabbed all the goodies, I can think about that.

Having new things to think about may not be exciting, but it gives me even more to keep an eye on.