Body Worlds 3!

I went to Body Worlds 3 today with Tarrah. It was soooo cool! We learned so many new things. Tarrah thought she’d be grossed out, but surprised she wasn’t. Few random facts we didn’t know:

1. Capillaries are thinner than a strand of hair, it takes 20 capillaries to equal the thickness of hair!
2. Your right lung is slightly larger than your left lung.
3. Lance Armstrong is super human, his heart is 30% larger than the average human heart… so he can get oxygenated blood to his legs and other muscles faster and for longer periods of time than most!
4. There’s a disease called Smoker’s leg, that is common in smokers. Their capillaries in the peripheral arteries will clot causing the leg to turn grey/black… it can be treated but also results in amputation commonly. ICK!
5. A baby embryo at 4 weeks old looks a lot like a worm.
6. The spleen is way smaller than you think… but can balloon up to like 6x it’s size if you have leukemia.
7. The funny bone is actually a nerve very close to the surface of the skin.
8. The human heart will continue to beat, even when out of the body and cut into pieces. An electric impulse causes it to beat. (the biggest challenge in artificial hearts - an energy source to keep it beating)

The exhibit totally made me want to apologize to my body and try to treat it better. I feel like I’ve been torturing it with not enough excercise. I’ll never smoke in my life though.. wow… you see photos and videos of black lungs of smokers but nothing compares to seeing real human lungs of a smoker… photos and videos don’t do it justice. It was appalling it looked like it could not be alive in your body in that state. The human body is so risilient! I’m shocked at some of the conditions of the organs we saw. There were several aortas shown of people with normal to high cholesterol and it was so disgusting what high cholesterol does to your aorta and that’s the largest artery! It turned into a lumpy spongy fat curly mess instead of a clean smooth artery for blood to flow through.  I can’t imagine what the smaller arteries must look like!

I recommend it to anyone. It’s totally worth seeing. At the end of the exhibit they added an ostrich and girafe, which were also very cool. It was neat to see how feathers grow out of a bird.

I’ll never take my body for granted again…