Fun Facts and Casualties of War

Anyone who knows me personally (and I'm betting most of you reading this fall into that catagory) knows that I love knowing obscure facts.  Most of them are usually pertaining to films and tv shows, but I still love me some weird facts.

And in honor of weird facts everywhere, I am posting some of the weird facts about the human body that I learned this past week.  Hopefully there will be many more to come.

~ The three most common types of cancer are colon, testicular, and breast.  These three parts of the body are also the three which get the least amount of movement in the whole body.  Your lungs, stomach, and various other body parts are almost always moving.

~ In order to keep a healthy and well moved colon, one should poop 12 inches of poop every day (!!!!)

~ In order to keep healthy and well moved testes, a male should ejaculate 5 times a week.  That's your que, guys!  You can always claim you're preventing cancer.  Unfortunately, I don't know if that applies to women as well.  :)

~ Riddle me this.  Despite those facts above, massage therapists are still told by doctors and scientists to not massage clients with cancer.  They do, however, tell cancer paitents to get as much exercise and movement in as they can.  So if movement can only help, and a massage is nothing more than moving various body parts, then why is are massages forbidden?

~ Currently, 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage.  Massage therapists are forbidden to massage women who are still in their 1st trimester.  There is no proof that massage causes miscarriages in any way.  It is simply for safety sake.  If getting a massage was the one thing you changed this week and then miscarried, most likely you would blame the massage and not allowing massages are in order to prevent such occurrences.  If you are craving a massage, then you can 1. not disclose it or 2. wait until you hit 2nd trimester.

~ When you break your wrist, you aren't actually breaking your wrist bones.  You are more likely cracking the tip of your radius or ulna (your arm bones) or the base of one of your carpals (hand bones).

~ Your funny bone doesn't exist.  It is the point where your humorus meets with your radius (they sort of hook into each other) and there are several nerves in between the bones.  When you hit your "funny bone" you are jamming your two bones together onto the nerves.

~ Your clavical is the first bone to start ossifying (hardening) in the fetus.  It is also the last to complete the process, most often in the teens or early twenties.

Those are all the facts I got for now.  Hopefully every week I'll be able to throw a few more out there that you can impress your friends and family with.  Before I go, I would like a moment of silence for the first casualty on my journey thru massage therapy school.

Two weeks ago, my hands looked like this:

Now they look like this:

Okay, maybe not that bad, but my poor babies are gone.  I have been very proud, bordering on sinful, of my nails.  And now that I'm using my hands the way that I am, I had to cut them down to the body of the nail (the non-white part).  It's going to be a personal challenge to make sure I keep them this short and still look at them in the same way.  I know what you're thinking... "they are just nails."  I know they are, but when you think that you have one pretty part of your body that you are truly and 100% proud of and then you have to destroy it in order to pursue a career, it's a bit painful to the soul.

My new personal mantra: "I love my nails the way they are, I love my nails the way they are, I love my nails the way they are."