Transplants, the immune system and why the hell is is all so complicated? Since people seemed interested, how's a semi-detailed rundown: Spoiler: the science. It's long. Okay so let's start out the main 'culprit' of transplant complications: your own immune system. The immune system mainly works by recognizing things that are foreign to your body, and destroying/inactivating them. Normally, it should only do that to things that are actually dangerous to your health, but sometimes it overreacts to harmless stuff and then you get allergies. Now, how does the immune system actually recognize what is 'you' and what is 'stranger'? It does, by and large, do this via a number of proteins or other surface molecules on the things it encounters. Say we got an bacterium swimming around in your blood stream, where it got no business being. If things work as intended, your (WBC) white blood cells (well, a specific subclass of them, but that might go to far rn) attaches to the bacterium via something called an antigen-antibody bound. Basically, the antibodies are attached to the white blood cells, and the antigens are attached to the outside of the bacterium. They can attach to each other in a lock-and-key system, so ideally, the bond is relatively specific and thus not everything will be able to bond. Once the bond is achieve a long signal cascade is started that activates other corners of the immune system and causes it to express antibodies that aren't attached to your WBCs which can clump the offending bacteria together, and also trigger other, specialized WBCs to stop by and chomp up those bacteria. The 'loose' antibodies remain in your blood, and the next time the same kind of bacteria shows up, they can immediately glomp onto it and alert your immune system, making the reaction much faster, potentially so that you don't even realize the bacteria happened to you again. This is essentially how vaccines work. This mechanism works essentially the same for every sort of foreign substance your body encounters, like viruses, parasites and yes that dreaded birch pollen that's fucking up people's springs, though of course the birch pollen isn't actually dangerous. But your immune system doesn't know that. Certain kinds of therapies for allergies aim to teach it but that doesn't work for all of them. So, where does that tie into transplants? Basically, the tissue of another human is, as far as your immune system is concerned, a big invasive object that Needs To Fucking Go, Right Now Immediately. That means that the chompy cells that eat the bacteria try to eat it, too. Plus so called 'killer cells' (yes they're really called that) come in and start killing the organ as well. The immune system does that because the transplanted tissue has a number of antigens on the cells, too. So does your own body. There are a whole number of antigens, all of whih have several variants (alleles), so there's a very very large variety of antigens that can be mixed and matched together from person to person. The more similar the donor antigens are to the receiver antigens, the less the immune system will try to fight it, because it'll be more likely to go 'oh hey, that's actually Part Of You and therefore fine'. Since the antigens are genetic, that means that people with a similar genetic background are more likely to share antigens and be compatible, with blood relations usually being first in line for testing when transplants are needed. That leads to us the different type of transplant that exist: the big split is Allogene and Autologe transplants Autologes are transplants that a person is giving themselves. Which sounds weird, but is very much possible. You can transfer for example veins or sinews from one point of the body to another. You can also, as was mentioned in the Jove thread, give bone marrow transplants to yourself, if cells were removed before the illness took place, and stored properly (usually on liquid nitrogen). Another option to get those cells is umbilical cord blood, which contains stem cells that can be used similar to bone marrow transplants. (there are also transplants from an identical twin which aren't autologe transplants because they're not from the receiver themselves, but instead a naturally occurring identical copy of the receiver) Allogene transplants are from someone else. A family member, or just a stranger that happens to have matching antigens. To match those antigens, many countries also 'typing' via a cheek swap, which basically maps out who of the people willing to donate have which antigen patterns, so that in case of someone needing a transplant, these databases can be searched and matches can be made. In allogene transplants, you can receive transplants either from someone still alive (bone marrow, kidneys, livers - your liver can grow back if you remove half of it, allowing people to donate while still alive) or from a corpse (hearts, lungs, etc) Since autologe transplants are taken from the patient themselves, they are the ones that have the lowest risk of rejections, though they might still run into issues with healing and scarring. Allogene transplants are those were rejection is the real issue. To fix that, post-transplantation, patients are usually given immunosuppressiva. That's a class of medications that suppresses the function of the immune system in one way or the other, to reduce the chance of the body realizing that hey, there's foreign shit in here, let's kill it. However, since the body has only this one way of recognizing foreign materials, downregulating it means that aside from not attacking the new organ, the body also doesn't attack other stuff, or at least not as much as it should. There are immunosuppressiva that are fairly selective and have less severe sideeffects, but if you take something with a relatively broad approach, you can easily end up more susceptible to infections, or with vaccines no longer providing protection to you. It might also raise your cancer risk, since your immune system also kills cancer cells in your body before they become an actual problem (most of the time). As an aside: autoimmune diseases happen when your body looks at its own antigenes and goes 'that's fucking foreign!' and starts attacking itself. Medication here is basically medicine going 'stop hitting yourself gdi'. Let's move on to how this ties into Jove's claims of having a mutation that makes them 'immune to rejection' That would mean that for some reason, their body is completely unable to recognize foreign tissue as foreign and react to it in the way an immune system should. Since your body has basically just this one way of recognizing when a thing is foreign, having an immune system that cannot do that means that your immune system is basically non-functional. If it cannot recognize when something is foreign, it cannot defend you against that foreign thing. It means you're severely immunocompromised. That means that any sort of surgery is gonna be tricky on you, because every surgery poses an infection risk because well, someone's opened up your body and put stuff into it. That wound, even if well tended to, is always at risk to become an entryway for infections. We can reduce the risk, but we cannot completely eliminate it. As such, a transplant on a severely immunocompromised patient is dicey and imo wouldn't be attempted at all if the transplant wasn't life saving, since exposing the patient to this sort of risk of Actual For Real Death would be prohibitive from a ethical PoV. Uterine transplants are already ethically fraught on cis people because again, this is a fairly invasive procedure, for the goal of 'get pregnant' which is.... not usually something that people's life depends on, and weighting the potential positive effect on the patient's mental health against the surgery risk is *hand wiggles* Which actually leads me to another point why Jove's claims would have raised alarm bells with me: a patient who cannot reject a transplant would be a TERRIBLE choice for testing a new procedure. The idea is, after all, to see how the average patient reacts to the procedure. That's how you extrapolate from a study. Using a complete outlier as your study subject to extrapolate from is complete nonsense from a scientific PoV. Any data gleaned from it would be virtually unuseable in a clinical context. Such a case might make headlines, but if you're trying to improve a medical procedure, headlines are not what you want, scientific rigor is.
.... okay so many people seemed to enjoy this post, should i start a 'ask the owlet' thread for people' biology question needs? Would that be useful?
Behold my herb fair look (local town is DEEPLY INVOLVED in herbs because they got a big medical tea company headquartered there)
life is so much better once you realize that you can put stickers on all your personal possessions if you so please like, i got a letter from @KaidaShade today, containing some con loot, including two stickers. one is a hatching dragon and now lives on the snail tank, and one is a mermaid peeking over a rock and now lives on the washing machine and of course my car has stickers (DNA strand on the hood, georgia aquarium whaleshark swim, and 'we'll carrion' hyena parade in the back, albino axolotl on the dashboard) and frankly it improves my mood a little every time I look at them. Because they're cute and they're mine and frankly I may have to buy more stickers from artists and/or etsy because other things need decorating too. I want my place to have all those little dots of color just jumping out at you from boring regular places like the washing machine or the side of my desk
(also re:herb fair look: i just realized i have a purse that matches this look, good bless. plus two long necklaces, one a leather string with half an ammonite on it, the other a string of various semi-precious stones)
Went to herb fair simce rain cleared up. Humid as hell tho. About to have some delicious food (flammkuchen with goat cheese, pear, honey and thyme) with a elderflower lemonade And later some small Baumkuchen thing with herbs and fresh fruit
'overdressed' is a tool of the bourgeoise to keep people from realizing their full potential. I do not subscribe to the concept :P
The Flammkuchen I swear a properly made one if the ideal topping delivery system, provided it's got enough structural integrity to not flop down sadly when you lift your slice (This one was very structurally sound)
I also got myself some probably grossly overpriced treats but listen. Listen. Sometimes you gotta be That Bitch and buy organic vegan handmade chocolate covered grappa grapes and chocolate cashew balls.
we got a tentative starting date for NorseHell campaign and I AM EXCITE Matt's first dnd incarnation gonna go liiiiive
@sirsparklepants i am a dumbass and just realized that you probably meant 'a recipe for this in general' not 'this specific thing I ate' So here's this one, which is close to what I had for the dough and cream sauce. For the topping you basically got free reign. Go entirely wild with whatever you have at hand or fancy at the time, i've seen vegetarian, fish or various meet versions. Hell i've seen sweet ones.
I'm headachey again and you know what's the best? that moment when the painpill starts working and the cloud of pain just LIFTS and things become bearable again. God bless modern pharmacy.
Longterm damages from the Siemens rep, urgh Like it sure is easy to say 'oh you should let it run to empty' when You have a backup analyser ready to go in a bigger lab But we got one machine to measure coagulation on, mit refilling the thing before it empties means it starts hollering, at highly inopportune times like 'during an emergency' or 'at 3am'. And then we can't just refill it because for that, another, separate machine has to be standing too, so we need to take two analyzers temporarily out of Kommission. And even after that is done, the coag machine still needs a complete restart, potentially in the middle of routine, to stop it from hollering abput new, bullshit errors. Iwear this woman is completely oblivious to how small Labs work, despite having just recently spdnt 8h in one. And YET she has the gall to tell us how to run things.
