Final Rest

For the past nine weeks, I have been writing about the human anatomy and sharing my knowledge with you. I have written topics on different parts of the human body that you can, either, donate to yourself, or donate to someone else.

Although I only wrote about a few number of body parts that people can donate, there are still quite a few other parts that people can donate and receive, such as a cornea transplant or a heart transplant.  I hope that by reading the posts, you can be more informed and aware of how much people are in need of these transplant to live.

As the name suggests, this will be my concluding post.

I want to continue and focus on my studies in college, and also, hopefully, learning more about human anatomy through my classes. My interest in human anatomy will not falter. By learning more, I can be more informed and can help spread the knowledge to others, so that others can continue to share the information, like a chain reaction.

However, I never did know how I would share this knowledge with others until recently.

Up until nine weeks ago, I did not think that I could share my knowledge and interest in human anatomy through blogging. However, you never know what can happen until you try. As for me, trying to blog about these topics made me feel comfortable and happy that, out there somewhere, someone is reading what I am writing. All I can hope for, is that my readers will help share this knowledge with friends and family so that they can help save another life.

As a new blogger, I have learned that, as long as you talk, well, write in this case, about something that you are interested in, the words will come out naturally. As I kept writing about the different parts of human anatomy, the words continued to flow through me more easily. I was excited that I was finally able to share what I know to others and, hopefully, share their new knowledge to people they know.

This new experience with blogging has taught me a lot about how I should relay information and how easy it can be to inform people. With blogging, not everyone who reads, knows a lot about that topic. So, it's really up to the blogger on how they want to present the information and how they want to express themselves, with really technical words or simple laymen terms.

Besides that, blogs can become very interesting, and have people continue to come back, wanting to read what the next post will be about. This interest can spread like wildfire, and soon, the blog will have a big following. With such a following, information can be spread very easily and, most likely, at sonic speed.

Although I don't have a big following, I hope that those who have read my blog posts, will inform others about the various parts of the human body that can be donated.

Was there a certain topic that you really liked? Comment below and help spread the information. 

Thanks for reading!

Be A Bone Marrow Donor Today and Save A Life

There are many ways you can help save others, and being a bone marrow donor is one of those ways.

So what is bone marrow? How can we use bone marrow to help save a life? According to Medline Plus, bone marrow is the material that is inside your bones. It contains a multitude of stem cells that will eventually become blood cells.

We can use bone marrow from a donor and transplant the stem cells to the patient, called allogenic bone marrow transplant. The other transplant, which will not be the main focus of this post, is called autologous bone marrow transplant. This procedure is for the patient to donate healthy stem cells from one site, to the area that needs those cells.

The procedure for harvesting these stem cells from the bone marrow is pretty simple. The doctor puts the person under anesthesia, and inserts a needle in the hip bone, to extract the bone marrow. Watch the video below to see what bone marrow extraction looks like.

Bone Marrow Extraction*

Video by: MetroMD

*Note that the procedure done in the video is for an autologous bone marrow transplant, which moves healthy stem cells to the affected area, within the same person. The procedure for harvesting bone marrow for others who need the bone marrow transplant, is also the same.

Although the procedure for harvesting bone marrow is a simple matter, the hard part for this procedure, is finding a match between patient and donor because of the many factors that doctors need to consider. This is why bone marrow transplants for people who need the procedure, is not easy. It can take months, or even longer, to find an exact match. Sometimes, the person won't even be able to find a match.

According to the Institute for Justice, more than 130,000 Americans will be diagnosed with a blood disorder, such as leukemia, that only a bone marrow transplant can help save. The majority of people who need a bone marrow transplant have to go to the national registry to find a match, which can take a lengthy amount of time.
Not only that, according to the statistics that is provided on the website:

 African-American patients find a match only 25 % of the time,

Asians 40%,

Hispanics 45%,

and Caucasians 70% of the time.

The need for more people of different racial backgrounds to sign up and be a bone marrow donor is crucial. Without you, people who suffer from these diseases will die.

Please take the time and sign up today. Click here to be a bone marrow donor and help save a life. You can also read stories of others who were saved because of bone marrow transplants.

Being a bone marrow donor can help change so many people's lives. Do you know someone who is a bone marrow donor, or have gotten a bone marrow transplant? Leave a comment below, and please, share your stories.

Is Blood Blue or Red?

Blood can actually be both, depending on where in the circulatory system you're looking. The terms for when blood becomes blue or red, are deoxygenated or oxygenated, respectively, and you will see why blood can be both.

So let's take a look at the circulatory system and see when blood becomes deoxygenated (blue) and when it becomes oxygenated (red), shall we?

Picture of the human circulatory system
Courtesy from: Health, Medicine, And Anatomy Reference Pictures

The picture on the right shows how blood flows through the human body. This may seem a little daunting, but I will try to make it less complicated.

Blood works like a never-ending roller coaster. According to the National Space Biomedical Research Institute: 

·         Your deoxygenated blood flows through your heart and goes out through the pulmonary artery, which leads to the lungs so the blood can become oxygenated.

·         After being oxygenated, blood flows back into your heart and goes out the aorta, where it splits into arteries, and flows throughout your body.

·         After the oxygenated blood travels throughout your body, the blood will become deoxygenated and have to travel back into your heart, where the process will repeat itself continuously throughout your life.

So why will blood become blue, but also become red? If you have ever bitten your lip, or cut your finger and tried sucking on the blood, you've tasted a weird iron-like taste. That is because your blood contains iron.

When iron reacts with oxygen, blood becomes red. However, when the oxygen is used up, such as when it has gone throughout our entire body, the blood will become blue. It's kind of like when you try holding your breath for too long, and your face starts to turn a bluish color.

Deoxygenated and oxygenated blood seem similar because both are blood in our body, but they do work in different ways. When blood becomes deoxygenated, it flows through the veins, instead of the arteries, which is why when you look at your veins, it has a bluish color.

Furthermore, deoxygenated blood has to work much harder to get back to the heart than oxygenated blood. Blood that travels through the veins has to work against gravity to get back to the heart, unlike the blood in the arteries, were it works with gravity and has a much easier time getting to the outermost parts of your body.

Deoxygenated blood needs help to flow, so by moving your legs, hands, fingers, and toes, the blood in those parts of your body will move against gravity and make it back to the heart, where it will once again become oxygenated.

So why should we learn about blood? Blood is one of the main essences of life. We can donate our own blood to help save others, by way of blood transfusions. Sometimes, the only way to help save a person is with blood transfusions. Below is a video by the World Health Organization about blood donation. Click here to find out more about where and how you can donate blood.

By: World Health Organization

Have you donated blood before? What was it like?

Skin Can Repair Itself? How?

To answer that question, let's start by watching this video:

By: canaldoandroido

Seems a bit complicated, right? There are many things going on inside your body when you break your skin, such as getting a paper cut, or falling off the bike.

However, let's first go over what your skin is made of, according to Ms. Apple's lecture at Wallenberg High School. Think of your skin like a garden. Your skin is composed of three layers;

•  the hypodermis, the bottom layer which has fat tissue, like the deep soil which has more nutrients
•  the dermis, the middle layer which has the oil and sweat glands, like seeds of a plant in the soil
• and finally, the epidermis, the outermost layer, which covers up the entire body, like the grass which covers the dirt.

So, when you get a cut or scrape yourself, how does your skin repair itself?

There a couple steps to this:

1. You bleed and your white blood cells go to the wound site and release histamines, which causes you to feel that pain

2. Your blood coagulates, or thickens, and a scab will form over the wound site

3. Stem cells, inside your body, move to that site and turn into new skin cells

4. Fibrin and collagen, kind of like a blueprint, form to give the structure for the cells to attach to

5. Lastly, your skin heals.

6. However, if your body produces too much fibrin and collagen in the previous step, that is when a scar will form instead.

Now that you know a little more on how the skin repairs itself, try watching the video again to see if you understand it better.

People should understand how the skin can repair itself because not a lot of people really know how, or why skin repairs itself the way it does. Some people, when they break skin, don't heal as fast. They get scars, instead of having the skin repair itself like the way it was before the injury. However, some people suffer injuries that are more severe than just letting the wound heal itself, which is why learning about how skin heals can be beneficial.

Let's take a turn into a different direction. I want to talk about how you can use your own skin to repair other parts of your skin. You now know how the skin can repair itself with the different things going underneath the skin. But how can you take skin from another part of your body? This process is called skin grafting.

What is skin grafting? According to Medline Plus, skin grafting is skin that's removed from one part of your body, called the donor site, and is transplanted to the affected area.

There are two types of skin grafting. The first is called split-thickness, which takes the top two layers of skin, and is usually for patients with less serious injuries. The second one is called full-thickness,  which takes the full thickness of the skin, and is usually for patients with more serious injuries.

During surgery, you are put under general anesthesia, and the doctor, usually a plastic surgeon, will take a patch of healthy skin, large or small depending on the affected area, and the patch will be used on the area that needs the skin. The video below will show how a split-thickness skin graft surgery looks like.

By: Dr Thomas McClellan

I hope that you have learned something new about skin that you did not know before. If you ever do get a cut or scrape some part of your body, you will know what is going on inside your body and how your skin is trying to repair itself. If you ever suffer an injury that would require skin-grafting, you will know how surgeons will help that injury recover.

Was there something new or interesting that you learned about skin repair and/or skin grafting? Leave a comment below.

My Fascination With the Human Body

Picture of the male human body.
 Courtesy from Steve Jurvetson

Since I have taken particular science classes during high school, human anatomy has become one of my favorite subjects to learn about. Although I am a Microbiology major at San Francisco State University (SFSU), I still love learning about how each part of our body works and how it keeps our body, as a whole, functioning.      

            The beginning of where this all started was back in high school. Biology was one science course that students were required to take. Although I enjoy learning about the human anatomy, my high school biology class was not the starting point.

            In my school, there is a program called the Health Pathway, which consists of a two-year program, and was also the starting point of when my interest in human anatomy began.. The first year of the program, which you enter when you are in 11th grade, is a course in physiology, where students are taught how the human body works. The second year is a course called Introductions to Biotechnology, where students learn about how the biotech industry work in labs and the lab skills associated with it.

            Both classes were really fun and enjoyable. In Physiology, we learned about different systems in our body, such as how the brain works, the muscular and skeletal system, and how blood flows through the body. During Intro to Biotechnology, we learned about different lab skills, like testing DNA for various reasons and inserting genes into the DNA of microorganisms to produce things like insulin.

            During my time in the first year of the program, an opportunity came from City College of San Francisco (CCSF). We were able to take a course at one of the CCSF campuses, while also attending high school, and also obtain college credit. This course was called HIT 50A, or Medical Terminology.

            This class helped me further my interest in human anatomy. In that class, we learned about the medical lingo, and how to deconstruct the medical terms to understand what it means, such as "enteritis", which means an inflammation in the small intestine. Along with learning about the medical lingo, the professor also had us learn about different systems, such as the circulatory, digestive, and the reproductive system.

            With the knowledge and experience I've gained from high school and the college course, I have really taken a liking to the human anatomy because it is fascinating, like space; people do not know much about it unless we take the time to learn what is there . It is surprising how the different parts of our body function every minute and every day of our lives, yet, we do not really think about or realize what is going on inside.

 Furthermore, if we knew more about how our body functions, we could make smarter decisions with helping our society by spreading our knowledge and donating parts of our body to people who need organ and/or tissue transplants.

Now that you've gotten to know me a little better and why human anatomy fascinates me, I hope you will learn and spread this knowledge for others to know. Are there any parts of the human body you like, or would like to know more about?