April 17, 2003

The spleen is disturbingly underrated. In a recent survey (1993) conducted by the American Spleen Awareness Institute, the spleen received an approval rating of 2.4, astonishingly .2 below the thymus and losing only to the Islets of Langerhans. This is clearly unacceptable. In fact, when asked to draw a picture of the spleen, 4 out of 5 survey respondents drew a single line segment, claiming that the spleen belonged to a stick figure, and the fifth person inscribed any of several colorful expletives in the allotted space.

Spleen ignorance is getting way out of hand. I myself did not know anything about the spleen until I performed a search on the Internet and discovered that there are evidently scads of beautiful women waiting anxiously to undress themselves in front of their web cams for my viewing pleasure.

It might surprise you that I don't know anything about the spleen, especially if you are one of these people that knows me personally and keeps calling me a “genius,” which really irritates me. Evidently, because I wear glasses with lenses more powerful than those used on Mount Palomar I am supposed to know everything about everything, which includes the spleen.

Well, I confess. I am not a font of useless anatomical trivia, despite my poorly behaved hair and glasses thick enough to shield my eyes from a nuclear explosion. I am, however, a font of grumpiness and sarcasm, both of which will always do in a pinch.

I may not be a genius, but I am a nerd, as evidenced by the fact that I would sometimes, while I was in bored in elementary school (any given day between kindergarten and 5 th grade), play with the plastic overlay charts in the World Book encyclopedias which dated to 1978, which explained why the covers were all the color of earwax.

These overlay charts were very interesting. Much more interesting, in fact, than phonics. They had this one chart about the human body that I liked to play with. The bottom page was a blank, gray human silhouette, and then you would lay plastic sheets on top of it, organ system by organ system, until you had built a really cool-looking flayed human being on the encyclopedia page. There were thyroids, thymuses, and gall bladders galore, but no spleens. This bothered me sometimes. “Why is there not a spleen on this flayed human?” I often found myself asking no one in particular. And then I would get my name on the board because I wasn't paying attention.

It's possible, of course, that everybody knows what a spleen looks like except me. It is possible that you are rolling your eyes at me right now because you, and everybody who's even remotely as cool as you, has several jars of disembodied spleens in formaldehyde sitting on their computer desk right now, as well as a giant poster on your wall labeled “SPLEEN” with a big picture of a spleen on it, and you are laughing at me inwardly because it is obvious I do not possess a single spleen-in-a-jar. I see how it is.

You will probably look down upon me because the only image of a spleen I can come up with is the one that biological authority Gary Larson provided in one of his Far Side cartoons. I'm sure you remember it. It's the one where a canoe- ful of explorers is riding down a river into a giant, throbbing organ of some kind, and the caption goes like, “Having just passed through the heart of Africa, the intrepid explorers enter the spleen.” Needless to say, most of the “spleen” is located just outside of the panel's reach, and all you can see is the edge of a big, amorphous mass of tubes and tissue, which you are left to assume is the spleen because, like me, you have never actually seen one before.

The reason I bring this up is because, a month or so ago (also known as: the last time Chris bothered to post a C-File), a nursing major friend of mine whom we shall refer to as “Jennie” informed me that, if I performed my 20 minutes of aerobic exercise for that evening in order to satisfy my wellness requirement, it was probable that my spleen would explode. No joke.

How would you react if someone told you that your spleen would explode? You might be just like me and look at her with a really confused and helpless face until she kindly explained that the spleen is located underneath your rib cage on the left side of your body. “It would hurt,” she explained. “A lot.”

I felt embarrassed that I had no idea where the spleen is located (similar, in a way, to the appendix and the prostate). But I imagine that there are people out there who, if asked to point to their spleen for a million dollars, would, on national TV, indicate one or the other buttock and frown pensively.

It would certainly help if mass media provided us with spleen-related information. It wouldn't have to be knock-over-the-head obvious such as “And Now NBC Presents: Dude, Where's My Spleen?” or “David Letterman's Know Your Less Edible Organs.” It could be subtle little phrases inserted into prime television shows, such as “You got your spleen kicked” or “I know it's right in my spleen of spleens.” Football announcers could yell “Wow! Right in the spleen!” This would help avoid future embarrassing situations like the one mentioned above.

Speaking of that situation, I just realized you are probably still wondering why “Jennie” told me that my spleen would explode. It makes perfect sense when you know that I had just told her I thought I had mono. Mono is a very popular disease to have among college students, because it removes responsibility for your cutting class from you and puts it on a totally unverifiable Epstein-Barr virus. Sometimes it seems like everybody's got mono, and you're almost tempted to get mono just so you don't feel left out, and also because mono is transmitted via saliva, which implies you've been getting a lot of kissing action lately.

So naturally I was hesitant to suggest that I had mono, based only on the evidence that I had been abnormally tired a lot and it felt like I was climbing Mount K2 just to walk from the science building to the Ganus Student Center*. Also I didn't ever feel like eating, which is highly abnormal in my case. But I did anyway, and as a result, “Jennie” informed me that if I really had mono and I ran, my spleen would explode.

I ran anyway. As best as I can tell, my spleen did not explode, although lately I've been feeling pain under my ribcage on the left side of my body. I've sometimes woken up in the middle of the night going, “Dang spleen.” Of course, it could be a pulled abdominal muscle. In fact, it is almost certainly a pulled muscle, caused directly by my mother, who got me to help hoist very heavy boxes on to the tops of shelves at the new preschool wing. “The heaviest boxes need to go on top,” she explained. “And make sure to lift them with an unnatural twisting motion in your groin area.” So I did, and, of course, I pulled some kind of abdominal muscle, which might explain why my “spleen” has been acting up at night recently.

This all needs to go away. I am sick to death of illness. First it's kidney stones, now it's flu-like symptoms accompanied by strained abs. Isn't there a get-well pill somewhere I could take and be instantly all better, besides codeine, of course?

Oh well, I just want to apologize for the extremely long wait for C-Files. I'm sorry. Really. From the bottom of my spleen.

*Not actually a student center.