“Your Kidneys Are Selfish”: 59 Facts About The Human Body That Are Both Incredible And Horrifying

A woman could be suffering from symptoms of a heart attack and pass it off as some acid reflux.

As an RN, I can say that personally the scariest thing is modern medicine keeping me alive long after my body should be gone, just because they can “fix it”. I fully believe that we have moved the goalposts on quality of life for it, and I hope if I can’t advocate for myself when the time is right that someone who loves me will.

echinoderm0:

Advance Directives are SO important for this reason. Some states have more specific forms than others, but you can use templates from other states or just create your own and still have a legally binding advanced directive.

Pregnancy related things get terrifying and dangerous quickly. Life might be precious, but nobody told nature. At least 25% of pregnancies end naturally in miscarriage without anyone doing anything wrong.

Anyone who tries to penalize or punish someone for miscarriage should be ashamed. It's already often painful and creates enough emotional upheaval, and sometimes trauma. The state has NO business getting involved in anything related to pregnancy.

Birth scars the bones and can cause tears. It's commonly traumatic, but nobody's supposed to talk about that side. I won't go into the insane costs from prenatal care through postnatal care. That shouldn't be forced on anyone against their will. There's a reason forced birth is a war crime.

The fact that the human body can just randomly develop so many incurable, life-altering, disabling, and even fatal diseases that currently have no identified cause. One random gene mutation, exposure to a certain pollutants or toxin, residual infections from common colds, there's so many things that can basically just cause your body to start relentlessly attacking itself. You could do everything right your entire life, exercise regularly, eat a clean, healthy diet, don't drink, don't smoke, you could do everything right in every way, and just accidentally become exposed to something in your environment that you have some kind of genetic sensitivity towards and boom. It will cause a chain reaction in your body that destroys your motor neurons and your nervous system leading to full body paralysis, respiratory failure, and eventually the end. That's what happens if you get something like ALS. There's no known cause. There's no cure, no way to prevent it. It's pure chance. And once you get it, you've got about 5 years maximum before it ends you. But before it does that, it will take away literally all of your bodily functions first.

SnooRobots7776:

I have heard of an overwhelming amount of cases of COVID turning into horrible problems down the road even if it didn't appear immediately after. I might actually be an example of it as well because the first time that I had COVID was almost 2 years ago, and I ended up developing POTS as well as some other issues that are in-progress to a diagnosis. Pretty insane that something like a type of illness that some had no problems with and even call a hoax now, can have such lingering and terrible effects for others.

'Locked-in' syndrome is actually a real thing. The affected person is fully aware and unable to move any part of their body except their eyes. 

They could also get 'Total Locked-in syndrome', which paralyzes the eyes too.

A child's jaw is literally 'filled' with teeth: both baby and permanent teeth are there at the same time, hidden under the gums. If you imagine this visually, it looks quite creepy.

Sudden aneurysms are pretty scary.

PapaTua:

My sister passed away this way right in front of me.
She had a mild headache all day, then a sharper pain for about 30 seconds, and then gone.
I'll be the same age she was when she passed in a year or two. I hope to go the same way at the same age.

Well, there's the whole thing about prions and their effect upon the brain. That's spooky.

throwaway_78325:

As someone in healthcare, prion diseases. The more I learn about them the more I spiral. The random/genetic variants are the scariest but I live in an area where the majority of my friends husbands/boyfriends are hunters and bring home game meat and absolutely not, I politely decline any sort of meat they’re serving at their house. Keep that away from me.

noctenaut:

Prions.

Tiny little proteins inside your brain, they replicate themselves by folding and then forming out another prion.

Sometimes, they fold incorrectly, and then cause other prions to do the same - eventually, widespread misfolded proteins cause damage to the brain, and introduce prion diseases such as ‘Mad Cow Disease’ or ‘Fatal Insomnia’.

Prion diseases are unique, most pathogenic illnesses are caused by foreign bacteria, viruses, parasites and other tiny organisms - but prion diseases are caused by agents of your own body, not foreign.

As such, where antibiotics, antivirals and other means of therapy against a pathogen are largely effective - no such therapy exists against prion diseases. Cases are always fatal. A good example is fatal insomnia - as the prions damage the brain further and further, the ability to sleep becomes impossible and the victim must wait for the body to give up. Hell on earth.

Prions are also incredibly hard to destroy, being resistant to alcohol, radiation, boiling, freezing and other conventional sterilisation methods - sometimes slipping into the food chain via farm animals such as cows, (hence ‘Mad Cow Disease’).

The also differ from other pathogens in that a misfolded prion overrides other proteins’ normal behaviour and thus causes them to misfold too. No other pathogen has the same ability - weaponising your own tissue against you.

As such, the central nervous system and eye tissue of somebody with a prion diseases is extremely contagious and require specialist destruction.

That your own immune system can destroy your body.

uhMothaWasAHamsta:

My immune system went after my kidneys. Now I’m on dialysis and hoping to get on the transplant list. They put me on chemo to destroy my immune system just to make it stop so now it takes me forever to heal, if I ever do.

Pregnancy has always been scary to me!

We’re all going to pretend it’s normal to have another human growing in another human?

Long-Amount-5436:

LOL. I thought I was a terrible person when pregnant that I didn’t find it magical. It kinda weirded me out. My daughter was loved and wanted and I was a good (enough) mom, but yeah, that pregnancy thing was weird whenever I felt the squirmy movements.

Your nerves are as thin as strings. First time I opened up a body and studied all the anatomy, it was shocking how nerves and blood vessels were incredibly thin. Like we get hit by balls or fall on rocks or do martial arts and dont think much of it but the wiring of your entire body is so thin it's sobering to realize how fragile we really are.

That tumors can grow eyes and teeth.

*retching noises*.

That, as amazing as the human brain is, it's seriously flawed and basically constantly hallucinating and making up data based on your past experience. You literally can't trust it to tell you the truth.

kupuwhakawhiti:

This take bothers me. A lot of what we consider bugs in the brain are actually features.
For example, a woman once lost the ability to forget. Sounds like a superpower. But decades after the passing of her husband she was unable to stop mourning him because her memory of the event was as strong after 20 years as the day it happened.

You won't know you're getting dementia. Your family/those around you will.

Psychosis/mania- had it year ago and it still haunts me, the thoughts&thinking is 100% faster, you cant decide what you want to do, you have so much energy, alter-images (you think you re all powerdul being etc) you feel like you re top of the world, you cant fall asleep and you feel like you dont need to sleep, and it lasted up to 4 days for me, it was horrible thing to go through.

There are more microscopic organisms living in and on your body than there are human cells. Made me question what it even means to be human.

Flesh eating bacteria can quickly lead to amputation and demise. According to the person from whom I learned this terrible ailment from, it's all but incurable, which reminds me... rabies.

That you can lose all your teeth during pregnancy because if you're not taking enough calcium rich foods, your foetus can take all the calcium from your teeth.
I actually saw a case like that on the internet.

The most frightening fact about the human body:
Your brain does not distinguish well between real danger and repeated thoughts.
You stress about something imaginary → cortisol rises → the immune system drops.
In other words, you can get sick from a story that only exists in your head.
The mind is not “just mental.” It is real-time biochemistry.

You can feel pain in a limb that isn’t even there anymore.
Phantom limb pain proves your brain can generate very real suffering without the body part existing.