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(After a headline like that, do I really need to say "GROSS CADAVER POSTING I WARNED YOU?" ;-)
So, recall that earlier I had a seminal conversation with Chris, in which I toured the heart and its valves and figured out how to tell what structure was what. Now, we are about to get tested on the intestines, so here we go: Let's tour the intestines today.
Okay, your food (ice cream, say?) goes in your mouth, down your esophagus, and to your stomach. (If you split the stomach open, you'd see corrugated folds on the inside called rugae.) From there, the ice cream goes through the pyloric sphincter and to your small intestine, specifically the duodenum.
(Right about then, the liver and/or gallbladder secretes some bile through the bile duct, and the bile emulsifies the fat in the ice cream you ate. I mention this now because the bile duct runs from the liver to the duodenum.) Anyway, the ice cream goes through the superior, descending, horizontal, and ascending duodenum.
Now the duodenum becomes the jejeunum. (All these intestines are held together by tissue called mesentery, which contains blood vessels in large arches called arcades. The jejeunum has single, large arcades.) The jejeunum becomes the ileum (which has multiple aracades in its mesentery) and winds its way down toward the lower right part of your abdomen. There it dumps into the cecum (which is the first part of your large intestine, AKA your colon). The cecum has a little bit of extraneous dead-end intestine hanging off it. This would be, all together now, your appendix. From the cecum, your colon goes UP (and is called the ascending colon), crosses in front of the small intestine at the right colic flexure (fancy name for a bend) and becomes the transverse colon, then goes through the left colic flexure (e.g. it bends again so it goes down) and becomes the descending colon. From there, it becomes the sigmoid colon and empties into the rectum and your ice cream exits your system looking remarkably unlike ice cream.
How did I figure this out? Well, one of the people in our class made a super-life-size drawing of it on a sheet (really, a bedsheet) and posted it in lab. Also, I had my hands in about four different cadavers. Grab the intestine, name it, follow it to the next part.
If I get inspired, I'll post about the other organs (kidney, liver, spleen, pancreas) tomorrow.
So, recall that earlier I had a seminal conversation with Chris, in which I toured the heart and its valves and figured out how to tell what structure was what. Now, we are about to get tested on the intestines, so here we go: Let's tour the intestines today.
Okay, your food (ice cream, say?) goes in your mouth, down your esophagus, and to your stomach. (If you split the stomach open, you'd see corrugated folds on the inside called rugae.) From there, the ice cream goes through the pyloric sphincter and to your small intestine, specifically the duodenum.
(Right about then, the liver and/or gallbladder secretes some bile through the bile duct, and the bile emulsifies the fat in the ice cream you ate. I mention this now because the bile duct runs from the liver to the duodenum.) Anyway, the ice cream goes through the superior, descending, horizontal, and ascending duodenum.
Now the duodenum becomes the jejeunum. (All these intestines are held together by tissue called mesentery, which contains blood vessels in large arches called arcades. The jejeunum has single, large arcades.) The jejeunum becomes the ileum (which has multiple aracades in its mesentery) and winds its way down toward the lower right part of your abdomen. There it dumps into the cecum (which is the first part of your large intestine, AKA your colon). The cecum has a little bit of extraneous dead-end intestine hanging off it. This would be, all together now, your appendix. From the cecum, your colon goes UP (and is called the ascending colon), crosses in front of the small intestine at the right colic flexure (fancy name for a bend) and becomes the transverse colon, then goes through the left colic flexure (e.g. it bends again so it goes down) and becomes the descending colon. From there, it becomes the sigmoid colon and empties into the rectum and your ice cream exits your system looking remarkably unlike ice cream.
How did I figure this out? Well, one of the people in our class made a super-life-size drawing of it on a sheet (really, a bedsheet) and posted it in lab. Also, I had my hands in about four different cadavers. Grab the intestine, name it, follow it to the next part.
If I get inspired, I'll post about the other organs (kidney, liver, spleen, pancreas) tomorrow.
