AK-Dave
3rd January 2006, 11:55 AM
The appendix in humans has apparently evolved to collect and store shotgun pellets.
From the Anchorage Daily News (http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7330153p-7242277c.html)
Though it may look vaguely like a hand grenade, the solid white structure in the X-ray is actually someone's appendix, visible only because it is full of shotgun pellets -- so full, in fact, that it is stretched to about three times its normal size.
The patient, a 73-year-old Inuit woman at Norton Sound Regional Hospital in Nome, had probably been swallowing the pellets inadvertently for decades, in the meat of ducks and geese shot by local hunters.
The image did not surprise the doctors who interpreted her X-ray, William Cox and Gene Pesola, who were used to seeing pellets -- though not this many -- in the appendix in Alaska Natives.
From the Anchorage Daily News (http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7330153p-7242277c.html)
Though it may look vaguely like a hand grenade, the solid white structure in the X-ray is actually someone's appendix, visible only because it is full of shotgun pellets -- so full, in fact, that it is stretched to about three times its normal size.
The patient, a 73-year-old Inuit woman at Norton Sound Regional Hospital in Nome, had probably been swallowing the pellets inadvertently for decades, in the meat of ducks and geese shot by local hunters.
The image did not surprise the doctors who interpreted her X-ray, William Cox and Gene Pesola, who were used to seeing pellets -- though not this many -- in the appendix in Alaska Natives.