Tuesday 15 December 2009

vented: my spleen


Ta-da!

As promised, here's a snap-shot of the offending Spleeneroony. This picture is taken from my CT scan 'movie' disk (one for the grandkids, eh) and has been recently been smuggled out - '24' style - by my secret agent working from within the hospital.

Now you're probably need a little orientation to understand this mass of grey, so bear with me.

1. You are looking at cross section of me, a slice
2. We have travelled from my head, down my body, towards my feet.
2. My 'bum' is on the floor, my tummy is sticking up
3. The brite white round-ish thing is my spine

With me? Right - we have just travelled down through my body towards my feet and stopped here - where you will see the large lumpy lumperson on the right hand side. The great glob of stuff is my spleen.

1. Note how it is pushing my kidney below. Look at the other kidney on the left for where is should be
2. Up and the the left of this squashed kidney is where my intestines are - they have been pushed and squashed to the left
3. The darker 'shadows' in the spleen, I have been told, is the badness growing within. Badness being cancer.
4. Note how it's pushing my stomach out at the top - I can feel him and give him a little pat now and again. For a small fee, I'll let you feel him too. But no patting.

All of this explains quite nicely why I have been walking around like a hunchback recently, clutching my side and grumbling (ok, I always grumble, but...)

I'm not 100% sure how big the spleen should be, but I'm fairly certain this is no ordinary garden variety spleen. This is a prize winning, jumbo-spleen that shall proudly sport a '1st' ribbon come the next annual Kings Langley Internal Organ Growing Competition.

I am so proud.

3 comments:

katherine said...

WOW! You've got a liver sized spleen. Thanks for sharing the photos. Really interesting to see. Take care of yourself! x

Rachel Duncan said...

bloody hell!! I havent seen an internal organ this size since the 1982 winner of the World Championship Organ-Size Cultivating Finals. V impressive xx

RC said...

Shitting hell that's a big one! Mine is large and aches but, from what I remember of the scans isn't quite as huge as yours. Mine was about equal in size to my liver and I'm told it'll go down during treatment.

It took me a while to get my head around the direction of my CT scans but from what you've described I think your spleen is on the wrong side. :)

I need to go back and check my assumptions. If mine isn't where I thought then I'm worried as something else is aching that shouldn't be.

Anyway I hope your treatment reduces yours, getting one out that size doesn't sound like fun.