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PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
PART 5
PART 6
PART 7
CHART CLUE
From age 19, Stina’s worst days were abdominal: sudden, severe belly pain with fever that sent her to emergency rooms – and once, at 19, cost her a perfectly healthy appendixA small, finger-like pouch attached to the cecum, thought to play a role in immune function.. The same fever-and-pain attacks returned for a decade, labeled appendicitis, then gastroenteritis, then IBS, then ‘functional’ pain; lately they are joined by quiet malabsorption – loose stools, bloating, and weight loss. Recurrent attacks plus a normal-appendix surgery, repeatedly shrugged off
The Story
The first time Stina’s abdomen seized, she was nineteen. The pain came out of nowhere – a deepAway from the surface of the body., rigid ache that made it hurt to walk, to breathe, to be touched – and it came with a fever. The emergency team did what any careful team would: they suspected appendicitis and took her to surgery. But when the surgeon removed the appendix, it was perfectly healthy. The pain faded on its own within a couple of days, as mysteriously as it had arrived. Everyone called it a near miss and sent her home.
It was not a near miss; it was the first attack of many. Over the following years the same picture returned again and again – abdominal agony with fever, lasting a day or two, then vanishing – and each visit earned a different label: a stomach bug, irritable bowel, stress, ‘functional’ pain. To understand why a healthy appendix came out and the attacks kept coming, students first need the organ at the center of the story: the digestive system, a single continuous tube running from mouthThe opening of the digestive tract where food enters and mastication begins. to anusThe terminal opening of the digestive tract through which feces are expelled., wrapped in a membrane whose inflammation can mimic almost any abdominal emergency. This module tours that tube and that membrane – and finally gives Stina’s attacks their real name.
From Stina’s chart: Age 19 – emergency appendectomy for suspected appendicitis; surgical pathology reads ‘appendix grossly and microscopically normal.’ Over the next decade: recurrent ER visits for severe abdominal pain with fever, variously labeled gastroenteritis, IBS, and ‘functional’ pain.
Compare Stina’s uninfected appendix to an infected appendix.
Activity:
Activity:
Before you can say what keeps inflaming Stina’s belly, you need to know how the gut is built. The next page unrolls the whole tract – and finds the membrane that turns out to be the culprit.
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One Long Tube, Four Layers
List of terms
- appendix
- deep
- mouth
- anus