Anencephaly

Information taken from: Wikipedia Anencephaly Information

---

Anencephaly literately means the absence of a brain. It’s a very rare case of congenital malformation of the neural tube. The neural tube being the origin of the whole nervous system, it is a structure that develops early on and any defect on its level has dramatic repercussions.
Technically:
The neural tube is formed starting from the 3rd week of pregnancy. It’s formed from the thickening of a precise region of a tissue called Ectoderm, the rest of the ectoderm will form the skin and the neural plate will penetrate the embryo and later on form a closed tube (neural tube), the sensory cells scattered around in the skin. The neural tube will give the brain and the spinal cord.
Unfortunately, in some cases this is not how things happen, the neural tube fails to close in the cephalic region. The tube is no longer a tube in that region, and the skin can’t climb over it and close it. Instead some underdeveloped nervous cells pile up, in a more or less organized manor without any bones to protect them or even skin.
Not all kids affected die prematurely, 45% of them reach the term of their gestation, but none lives a lot longer than 6 days. They are born blind, deaf, unconscious, and unable to feel pain. Never in their short life will they gain any consciousness and most of them actually die because their rudimentary brain cannot regulate properly essential body functions.
95% of parents, once informed with their child’s situation choose to terminate it. Though medical intervention (reparatory surgeries for other defects that may accompany anencephaly, antibiotics, assisted ventilation…) may increase the life of such a baby, but most of the times the child is allowed to die smoothly and with as much dignity as possible.
There is no cure for this defect, because by the time the case is diagnosed the development is already altered, and there is no way to fix it. The only weapon we have is folic acid which is known to reduce the prevalence of this defect, problem is that by the time a woman knows she is pregnant then it’d be too late!
When I read this I can’t help but to remember all the babies/kids/people that only get a partial chance of living, the ones that are born with severe defects, the ones that are born in severe poverty, in war, in abusive families. I can’t help but to think of Layal. In my mind I keep on thinking: which one had a better chance? Which life was better? Certainly Layal lived till teenage and sure she actually KNEW the world, these kids never had that chance. But on the other hand Layal only had the chance to know a world she REALISE she would be deprived off, a world that she KNEW she never belonged to, and a world she SAW how she will leave… She felt pain and she realized she will die… Soon!
Isn’t that much more cruel than leaving a world you never knew to care for?

Orca's: Out of your posterior

This is very interesting, at first sight hilarious but actually very important to know. It’s a surgeon’s experience (his nickname is Orac) with “odd objects” that he extracted over the years from people’s rectum. I often heard that people would stick weird objects in their “posteriors” but don’t take my word for it… Read about his experience: Pulling it out of your posterior
What struck me as odd is that it’s usually men that he has operated, I am sure that there were women, but maybe women don’t need to stick things up their asses so often. After all, if it is for sexual pleasure we can always get a guy or a dildo, men wouldn’t. But what about the psychological disorders… we have lots of that too!

Reporting on the exam day I just had yesterday:

This semester I had exams before this one, actually one exam, our biotechnology Lab exam though it was strictly written exam there fore it was more like a course exam rather than a lab exam. Anyway that exam went well, actually it went so well that when I reached the 3rd question (out of 4) I was so happy that I had done so well, and noticing that I wasn’t so sure of my answer for the 4th question, especially that I was late and only had 5 min… I didn’t do it. Hey! The 50/100 is certain so what the hell anyway?

Now about yesterday… On Tuesday night I wasn’t hoping so much, I was late, I had 5 chapters to study all and all, on Tuesday I had only finished 2 chapters: Respiratory and Cardiac system (but had many blackholes in my memory since it needed revising) and had studied lightly 50% of the Digestive system and studied well some 30% of the Excretory system and hadn’t even opened the Microcirculation chapter… this was around midnight. I know it may sound fucked up how I partially studied so many bits of chapters but it was far better than I had studied for my exams last semester! So I had to make the choice: to study further or to sleep. I decided to take a bath and then review what I had already studied. And so I did, sleeping at around 2 am. I woke up very scared and nervous about the exam. But I thought to myself, I better study the respiratory system and the cardiac system since I know that will have much more notes than the other system (because this is a written exam for the lab work we had done, the lab work was mainly about the heart, respiration and adaptation of circulation).

My dad took me to college as he does everyday on his way to work, in college I learned the following shocking details:

• My exam was at 10am and not 8 am….. but that’s not bad I got 2 additional studying hours


• The digestive system was not for this exam (it was for the final course exam in a week!) which sucks because I had wasted so much time studying it and I had skipped studying the Excretory system to study the digestive system!
  

Ok not problem I survive, I focused on the respiratory and the cardiac system! Yalla courage! And I was pleasantly surprised to realize that my partial and limited knowledge exceeded my friends’ information, which meant that my studies had paid off and that I was doing a good job at it as I was able to explain it to them.

At 10am we read the questions…. The shock!!! All the questions were about the frog dissection we had done in lab! I forgot to study the lab shit! I was too busy studying the course that I forgot to check the 3 pages of lab instructions, that certainly cost me valuable notes but I didn’t give up I did as good as I could and tried to be as reflective and as analytic as possible, that’s what the Dr wants anyway.

As a conclusion I think I did pretty well… nshalla. But none of my classmates agreed, you see in the Lebanese University these people are used to plain and simple question, if you study hard you get 100% no thinking required. This teacher is different, not only she requires analysis and overall understanding but she also adjusts her exams in a way where even the best student would reach his/her limits, it’s almost impossible to have 100/100 with her, there’s always a detail you’ve skipped a small note you forgot there’s always a higher level to which you can take your answer… As far as I am concerned this is one of the best teachers I have ever met in the Lebanese University, in addition to the paleontology professor we had last year, I can’t imagine greater perfection in both lecturing and exams.


But the long day isn’t over yet, after this mind blowing exam, we had a lab session, this session was supposed to take place last week but back then it was postponed because of PM Walid Eido’s assassination. This was more or less fun and more or less instructive, but the heat, the lack of concentration and the headache the whole class suffered from made it intolerable. That was over at 2 15pm.

Then I had to work on fixing my memoire with my partner in the memoire from 2 30 till 6 pm. And still it wasn’t over, we needed some details about how to fix the bibliography in the end so we called the teacher in charge of our memoire she wasn’t home and her husband’s cell phone was with her son! FUCK! So we gave up, I took the memoire with me home and called her a while later.

So you can see my day was both productive and exhausting, and that’s why I was so absent lately. And about the braderie…. Ouuuu I hope I can go today! I have to wait till my mom comes home and see if I can leave G with her, she might have to take him to work with her… nshalla nshalla