"Surgeons: What Weird Facts Do You Know About The Human Body That You Don't Share With Anybody?"

There aren't many occasions I get to share this.


A colostomy is when the intestines are hooked to an open port on the skin, bypassing some portion of the lower digestive tract. There's a lot of reasons this might need to be done, and for shorter or longer durations.


Some people have colostomy bags for years, and this is where things can get very interesting. You see, your r****m produces mucus to help smooth your movements along. Even if there's no passengers on the train, your body keeps greasing those tracks (I don't know anything about trains).


And since there's nothing to move the mucus, it just kinda hangs out. Sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades.


And in that time, it becomes something like a human pearl. By roughly the same mechanisms that pearls are formed in oysters. They can be very uncomfortable for patients depending on their size and location, its not a super uncommon problem and its fixable.


I've seen two that were roughly the size of baseballs. Those two flew completely under the radar until we tried to hook the plumbing back up, no pain or discomfort.


One of them I saw cut open, it looked like a jawbreaker with layer upon layer of what in the f**k. They're dense, hefty, with a little give near the skin.


So yeah, humans can make pearls.

It's not exactly unknown fact , but ...
The brain can shift during surgery.
Even when the skull is fixed in place, the brain is soft and mobile—almost like firm tofu.

The brain has no pain receptors. Although it processes pain signals from other parts of the body, the brain itself cannot feel pain.

That’s why during certain brain surgeries (like awake craniotomies), patients can be fully conscious without feeling pain—even while their skulls are open and brain tissue is being stimulated or removed.

I have most profound conversations with people while I am picking their brains. Literally. I also get a lot of "last confessions " during these surgeries, and it's definitely awkward a bit when I have to meet their spouses or other family members 😂

But probably my most interesting experience was when I heard full on Vivaldi Winter during surgery played by the patient. It turns out he was a professional violinist from Austria. It was brilliant.

Funny experience was when an elderly lady who literally was undergoing life saving surgery shaded me for my life choices - because operating room is no place for a proper lady and I should have babies. She was brilliant - she was so keen on her opinion even while I was the one operating on her 😂😂

The brain pulsates in sync with your heartbeat.
It's a rhythmic, constant movement - it's actually BEAUTIFUL.
Real brain tissue is softer, more fragile, and surprisingly watery. It can be torn or injured just by suction or light pressure.

But what I admire and am astonished the most is that
every person’s brain is wired differently. Actual locations of speech, movement, or memory can vary person to person. That's why we do brain mapping during surgeries. It's pretty cool , like exploring unknown... And shows how unique humans are.

I am a scrub nurse and I can smell when the surgeon has cut into the uterus because the blood smells different. It smells like period blood. I mentioned it once and all my male colleagues (including the surgeon) can’t tell but all the women in the room were like yep, i can always tell when we are in the uterus.

Surgical nurse. Sometimes when babies are really wedged into the pelvis I have to go up through the v****a to push the baby back in. At the same time, the surgeon is going into the C-section incision with their hand to pull the baby’s head out. It gives me the heebie jeebies when our fingers meet inside from two separate holes.

I'm not a surgeon (medical scientist), but one interesting thing is that the Skene's and Bartholin's glands (female lubrication glands) are both named after men, so modern anatomical education is encouraging people to call them paraurethral and vestibular glands instead.

Not a surgeon, but a perinatal and neonatal nurse.

I knew almost nothing about menopause until recently. I was horrified to learn that the clitoris and labia can atrophy (shrink and become fragile and dry) very significantly, resulting in anorgasmia. This can be prevented and at least somewhat reversed with vaginal estradiol.

That atrophy is part of GSM, genitourinary syndrome of menopause, which affects the v****a, urethra and urinary meatus, and external genitalia. The tissue atrophy increases susceptibility to UTIs, which can be life threatening in older people.

$60/year worth of vaginal estradiol can prevent all sorts of pain, suffering, and death. But when women complain of vaginal dryness, they often just get told to use lube, which offers no protection from GSM.

Holding a beating heart is continually the most humbling and incredible feeling. Really makes you appreciate the spontaneity, strength, and fragility of life. This muscle is just banging away under your palm for no apparent reason, keeping time all on its own. And even though it kinda feels like a fish just consistently/steadily flapping its tail in your hand, it represents this person's whole life and is strong enough to handle decades of high blood pressure, fat, sugar, exercise, fear, love, and all the other things you throw at it.

Also lungs are kinda squishy when they're inflated, like a thicker wet balloon, but are really mushy and very slightly sticky when they're deflated, like an airy playdoh or unbaked focaccia dough.

During organ transplantation, when a donor liver or kidney is totally hooked up, it starts filtering immediately. The more waste that needs to be cleared, the faster the urine or bile comes out.

Not a surgeon or a dr, but when studying medicine in undergrad, I shadowed many doctors across numerous sectors of the medical field to determine which area I wanted to go into. (Spoiler alert - ended up not-going to medical school after all).

One of my rotations was with a wound care doctor, mostly related to bed sores that develop when a person lays in bed for too long. One particular patient had a sore directly on his a*s check, and it was so pronounced and developed that you could see his pelvic bone in the middle of the sore.

For some morbid reason, I asked if I could touch his a*s bone lol. Both the patient and the doctor agreed to it, and come to find out - he no longer had feeling in the area and could not feel me touching his bone. When wounds on the body deteriorate to that level, it also damages the nerve endings (meaning you could literally have a gaping wound/hole in your body and not even feel it). Gives me heebie jeebies.

When you get bowel surgery of any kind, there's some degree of stool (poop) or succus (digested food before it turns into poop) that will invariably spill or get into the incision. It's not uncommon for me to do a hemorrhoidectomy and have to rinse the stool off the incision before I suture it closed. Remarkably, a touch of antibiotics during the case and rinsing the incision with saline is almost always enough to prevent an infection.

Now when your colon perforates at home and you try to tough it out for a few days before coming in half dead, you're gonna have a bad time. And if you survive you'll get a colostomy (poop bag out of your belly) like that other surgeon talked about.

Also, I've smelled a lot of horrible things in my tenure. Ruptured infected cysts, dead feet, stagnant vomit... NOTHING is worse than dead colon.

PSA please for the love of God, don't put off your colonoscopy. Start at 45 years old or 10 years before the age your first degree relative got colon cancer.

Not a surgeon but a nurse. If you transplant a heart in a baby or little kid it will grow with them.

Most people do not routinely clean their belly buttons. I’ve pulled worse things from belly buttons than I have from rectums.

Fat makes my job 10x harder (and your risk 10x higher).

Your organs don’t feel pain when I cut or burn into them.

You almost never have to “get the bullet out.”

Operating is literally fun. Especially on the robot.

Burning tissue smells like a steakhouse. And so I usually think about food. Stool and pus and dead bowel smells like 2 day old roadkill on a hot humid day. And yet I still think about food.

Leaving a dirty wound gaping wide open has a zero chance of infection. Suturing said wound closed is a guaranteed infection. It’s opposite of logic.

The OR staff are usually chatting idly about anything and everything not related to you or your surgery.

I almost ALWAYS have music on in my OR, and most other surgeons I know do too. Everyone’s got an OR playlist.

We do not care about or comment on what you look like naked.

Most employment models these days are salary based, and there’s little financial incentive for me to operate on you. I don’t get kickbacks from device or d**g companies. I have no say in billing practices or what you’re billed.

I tell my kids that I have the coolest job in the world because I get to cut people open and fix them, but they could care less.

1) I remember being in medical school during my surgery rotation and thinking, I can see secret, inside parts of this person they will never get to see. It’s their liver, but they don’t know what it looks like. And I do. I thought that was pretty magical.

2) if you are getting any kind of orthopaedic surgery, there is probably some poor med student trying valiantly to hold your leg/arm at the perfect angle for the surgeon for an extended period of time and wishing they had lifted more weights because they also have to hold it in a way that maintains sterility and usually this means they are holding an adult humans’ entire dead weight of leg as far away from their own body as possible. I remember wishing I was swole.

3) When they are releasing a frozen shoulder, they full on just crank the s**t out of your shoulder. It looks quite violent. One surgeon told me shhh shhh shhh listen… CRSSHHHH goes the person’s shoulder and the surgeon sighed in satisfaction and said, man, I love that sound. It was a horrible sound.

4) Orthopaedics is basically human carpentry, with literal power tools. The blood gets everywhere. I would walk out of the OR with blood on my forehead that had managed to get over top of my clear visor.

Peeling a cyst out of an ovary with your hand is super satisfying. Better than peeling the protective clear plastic off of your new TV screen. But we don't take out cysts through a big incision hardly ever anymore, it's all laparoscopic for the most part now, so I don't get to do it much.

Obligatory, not a surgeon, but I spent 6 years as a scrub nurse on the OT, and I have a 15+ year career as a senior RN. I have seen and worked in most specialised areas.

I am constantly amazed by how tough the human body actually it. The body can take way more abuse and neglect than you think it can. Things that you'd be absolutely certain would k**l a person can be recovered from.

But don't f**k with the delicate balance of electrolytes. You can rip off every limb, break every bone, rip out or shoot holes through most organs (so long as you stop the bleeding in time), there are even guidelines on how to, over several hours, do CPR on a person who has not had a heart beat for the best part of an hour due to extreme hypothermia, I've even seen an abdominal aorta accidentally cut clean in half and the person lived. But take a bit too much potassium, and you're a goner.

Surgeon here


Patients with hope, humor, or gratitude tend to heal more steadily.

Those with negative emotions often show slower recovery and more complications.

Not a surgeon but I’ve scrubbed into abdominal surgery before to hold organs out of the way. With intestines, you can basically pull them out, then plop em back in and they just…. kinda sort themselves out. You can also feel peristalsis if you’re holding them.

Dentist here. I still find great satisfaction when the last periodontal ligament fiber breaks while pulling a tooth. Holding the tooth in your forceps and looking into a clean boney socket 😌

Imagine taking out an ingrown hair, or finally popping that pimple. But so much better.

Surgeon.

Interesting facts about the human body most people don’t know:

-women tend to carry more fat under the skin, men tend to carry more fat around their organs in their belly

-when your arteries are diseased from smoking, diabetes, they form plaques which then try to heal by pulling calcium out of your bones and putting it into the walls of the arteries. Very diseased arteries feel like pieces of chalk they are so hard from all the calcium.

-you have about the right number of arteries, but you have more veins than you really need. Veins serve as a reservoir for extra blood, in addition returning blood to the heart after oxygen delivery.

Thin patients almost always do better surgically as less intra abdominal fat makes the surgery more precise and nothing beats precision when it comes to surgery. The few times I've operated on marathon runners... it was absolute bliss

Edit 1: since loads of people have asked this... high muscle mass but lower body fat is still far easier for intra abdominal surgery compared to high body fat content. If you are a body builder we may have to go through more muscle to access your peritoneal/abdominal cavity but after that the surgery will still be easier and allow for more precise dissection.

Ideal muscle mass level... think Brad Pitt in fight club and less the rock. But I'd pick both over a very obese patient any day of the week. Hope this helps.