by Bart King
There have been a number of historical figures who could have used this system. In the 1400s, King James of Scotland was ambushed in his bathroom by murderous nobles. And a murderous monk stabbed French King Henri III while he was taking care of his royal business in 1589. Worst of all was the fate of Japanese warlord Uesugi Kenshin, who was enjoying a private moment when he was attacked from below by a ninja assassin who’d been hiding in the toilet’s cesspit for days!
But let’s get back to you. Unless your home has a septic tank, everything that gets flushed will hook up with the run-off water from your shower and the kitchen sink. This wastewater runs out of your home to the sewer, where it joins the rainwater (and anything else) running down street drains.
And ALL of it is piped to a “wastewater-treatment plant.” Before we get there, maybe we should take a little field trip into the sewer. But first, you have to be prepared!
Going Into the Sewer? Be Ready!
Before climbing down into the dark world of the sewers, you’ll need:
A hard hat with a miner’s light
Rubber hip waders
Heavy rubber gloves
Overalls
An emergency breathing device (in case you hit pockets of poisonous gas)
A walkie-talkie to communicate with your back-up team
A spear gun for the rats (kidding!)
Even though you’re pretty well covered, try not to touch anything while you’re in the sewer. Hepatitis, typhoid, cholera, and many other bacteria and viruses live down there. Also, don’t make any sparks! Sewers have methane in them, and you know that’s flammable. It would be pretty stinky to get caught in a huge poop fireball!
Okay, you’re at the bottom of the sewer line. It’s a dark, moist, underground world down here! Be careful not to get lost. Some sewer systems, like the one under London, are so colossal that they haven’t been fully explored since they were built.
Now you’re ready to see the sights! In addition to water, pee, and poop, you’ll find everything that people can flush down a toilet or run down a storm drain: dead tropical fish, hair, lint, soap, diapers, toothpaste, leaves, Q-tips, razor blades, needles, and hundreds and hundreds of cell phones. And there are also drain cleaners, weed killer, and baby shampoo (Nooo!) to worry about.
And You Thought Overflowing Toilets Were Bad!
Sewer systems often overflow when it rains. That puts raw sewage right into your nearest stream, river, or harbor. For example, New York averages fifty million gallons of sewage overflow every week!
If you’re trying to guess the scariest thing you’ll see, “grease” is the word! When restaurants and people cooking at home need to get rid of used cooking oil and grease, many just pour it down the drain. In the sewer, the grease will collect and solidify until it turns into a fatty, impenetrable wall that clogs everything. (Nooo!)
But WAIT—I just got some bad news! Rainy weather is coming. That means you need to get out of the sewer quickly. Sudden rainfall can turn a nice, quiet sewer into a raging torrent of rainwater in no time flat. (That is, the sewer will fill up in no time, and you’ll be knocked flat!)
After you get all of your sewer gear off, it’s time to catch a ride with your mom to the wastewater plant. First, the brown water in the sewer flows through screens that filter out the big stuff. Any poop that’s still in one piece will get crushed right through these, but anything that shouldn’t be in the water (like water bottles and Q-tips) or any food that wasn’t digested (like corn kernels) can get caught here.
Now, THAT’S Gross
Worldwide, about 90 percent of all human sewage gets dumped straight into the ocean. This creates dead zones where no marine life can exist. There are currently more than four hundred of these.
The first city sewers just dumped all the poop and pee into the nearest river, lake, or ocean. Not good! But the brown wastewater from your sewer is pumped into a giant tank or pool and left alone. This is so the solid waste in it can sink to the bottom and the grease and fat will float to the top as scum. Nice!
Leaving the solid waste and scum behind, the water is pumped out to holding tanks. Oxygen is then piped into the water to help bacteria break down its remaining organic wastes. As oxygen is pumped in, the brown water bubbles, and it looks like chocolate mousse.
If the bacteria do their job, the once-brown water will eventually become clear. But it’s still polluted! Some wastewater plants will now pipe this water into the nearest brook, river, lake, or ocean. But the good wastewater plants will filter this water through sand and then shoot it with ultraviolet rays of light, which kill any harmful germs still hanging around.
Two things come out of a wastewater treatment system: clean water (yay!) and the sludge that’s made up of all the pollution and gunk that’s been filtered out of the water (blech!). This sludgy stuff—called “biosolids”—is nasty, and getting rid of it is a problem. Until 1998, U.S. plants could just dump the sludge at sea. Nowadays, the sludge sometimes gets burned and sometimes buried. And if the sludge is treated properly, a good use for it is as fertilizer.
Septic Tank?
If your home’s plumbing isn’t hooked up to a sewer system, then you probably have a septic tank somewhere nearby. This is a big underground tank that all of your family’s waste flows into through a pipe. The solids sink to the bottom of the tank. As for the liquids, they usually sit in the tank for a while before getting leaked back into the nearby soil (aka, “septic field”).
So if you have a septic tank, at some point someone’s going to need to come and muck it out! This involves big trucks, big vacuums, and big hoses.
When I was a kid, we had a septic tank, and I remember the first time a guy came to vacuum it out. I’d never realized there was a huge tank right under home plate on our backyard’s Whiffleball field! When the guy opened the lid, he laughed. There was a thick, solid crust of grease that had formed over the top of the tank’s contents! (Remember, grease floats.) He had to take a crowbar and break through the grease crust before he could start vacuuming the solids out. And as soon as he broke that crust, it really stank!
It was so bad that after he left, we moved home base!
Gross Anatomy
The human body is gross enough when it’s actually healthy. So as you can imagine, some of the things that can go wrong with us are pretty horrendous. But don’t worry—I’m not going to write about someone having a three-hundred-pound cyst removed from his nostril. Look, there are entire series of books dedicated to all the major illnesses that a person could get, and this isn’t one of them!
So, instead, why don’t you take a couple of deep breaths and say “Aaaaahhh”? After that, we can warm up with a few junior illnesses.
First up is a nose infection called rhinitis caseosa. The medical dictionary says that when someone gets this, the nasal cavities “are more or less completely filled with a foul-smelling cheesy material.” Wow! Apparently, this nose cheese is teeming with nasty bacteria and germs. Then pus gets added to the mucus, and it starts smelling really bad. Yes, the nose stinks! In some cases, a doctor may have to remove over three inches of “foul-smelling cheese” from the nose just to clear the sinuses.
But medications help cure rhinitis caseosa, so it’s not considered dangerous. Just gross!
But I Don’t WANT to Live in a Graveyard!
Settlers built Louisville, Kentucky, on top of ponds. The ponds had lots of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes had lots of diseases. This led to one of Louisville’s first nicknames: the Graveyard of the West.
Gross-Sounding Parts of the Body!
The Toast from Outer Space
Eyes are made out of jelly. Eye jelly. Doesn’t that strike you as a little strange? You can see out of two dabs of jelly! And there are huge holes behind the dabs, which means that, theoretically, you could be scratching your eye, your finger could slip, and then your finger would plunge into your brain!
I’m just saying.
What if aliens came to earth and wanted
to use our eye jelly to spread on their toast? There would only be ONE way to save the human race, and here it is:
We would have to let our gound build up.
Huh? You don’t know what gound is? Then we’re all doomed . . . unless you keep reading and learn that gound is the dried mucus that builds up around your eyes while you sleep. Let’s see how those stinking Martians like some of our eye snot on their toast! And if they try to switch to bagels, our bed boogers still aren’t going to taste ANY better!
TWTHTBG: Trying Way Too Hard to Be Gross
An Indian man named B. Y. Tyagi has the longest ear hair in the world. It’s four inches long—and still growing!
You also have tiny spider-like organisms living in your eyes. That’s right, there are follicle mites living in your eyelashes. But the grossest thing about eyes are worms . . . eye worms! These one-to-two-inch-long worms, known as the Loa Loa, are able migrate around the body’s tissues. If a Loa Loa decides to cruise into an eyeball, a person can feel (and see!) the worm fairly easily!
But unless you live in Central Africa, you don’t have to worry about getting these. Whew!
While eye worms are rare, some medical problems are simply one of a kind. The most bizarre story I’ve heard lately is of a Russian man who complained of chest pain. Doctors went in to investigate, and they found a five-centimeter-long spruce tree (complete with green needles) growing in the man’s lung!
The doctors were stumped by what they saw. (Get it?) They assumed a tree seed had somehow gotten into the moist confines of the man’s lung and started to grow! So they got out a chainsaw—kidding! They surgically removed the tree from the man’s lung, sewed him back up, and told him to stop inhaling spruce seeds.
When it comes to having surgery, you might think that hearing the doctors say, “Crikey! He’s got a spruce tree growing in his lung” would be the last thing you’d want to hear from the operating table. But there might be something even worse, like perhaps:
“ I am now transplanting the patient’s brain into this orangutan’s skull.”
Scrofula and Leprosy
Some diseases have such disgustingly cool names, you just have to take notice. Like scrofula! This disease causes large glandular swellings in the neck. (Nasty!) And it even has a cool nickname: the King’s Evil. (That’s because it was once believed that a touch from a king could cure the disease. How’s that for scientific?)
But not to worry. In the very unlikely event that you were to get scrofula, it’s treatable with modern antibiotics. But a disease you wouldn’t ever be able to get rid of is leprosy, which causes your skin to get thicker while your nerves die off. Then your “extremities” (the parts of your body farthest from your heart) get numb and rot. Sometimes they fall off. As the disease worsens, you can lose your fingers, toes, nose, eyebrows, and even bigger pieces of yourself.
But Did It Hurt?
In 1996, a Missouri woman sued her county government after she fell in an icy school parking lot. According to her lawsuit: “All the bones, organs, muscles, tendons, tissues, nerves, veins, arteries, ligaments . . . discs, cartilages, and the joints of her body were fractured, broken, ruptured, punctured, compressed, dislocated, separated, bruised, contused, narrowed, abrased, lacerated, burned, cut, torn, wrenched, swollen, strained, sprained, inflamed, and infected.”
Since leprosy can be contagious, “lepers” have historically been discriminated against. In parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, they could be denied inheritances, and they weren’t allowed to walk narrow streets because they’d get too close to other people. And on top of all that, putting “Leper” on your business card is not going to impress anyone.
There are names even more gross-sounding than scrofula or leprosy. For instance, how about blepharitis? I had this once, and it was so horrible, I can’t share its symptoms with you, even in a book like this![13]
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s Scars
While scars usually heal up nicely, sometimes they can go backward in time! Here’s how:
Scurvy is a disease that sailors used to get due to a lack of vitamin C. What happens if you have scurvy is the “glue” that holds the body together starts to vanish. First, a scurvy victim gets loose teeth, rotten gums, and joint pain. Then scabs stop healing and actually turn back into open wounds. Finally, old scars open up and healed broken bones break again! Scurvy used to be so common among sailors that a third of a ship’s crew often fell victim to it as late as 1800.
Scabs and Bruises
Look, I don’t know how you got that scab in the first place. Maybe your sister came after you with a butter knife after you teased her about her shoelaces. Or maybe your dog stuck a spork in your lymph node because you wouldn’t play Fetch.
All I know is what happened after you got cut. First, you were bleeding. Downer! That always seems to happen. I used to wonder if there were a little spot on the body without any blood vessels. But it turns out that if you take a gentle pinch of the skin anywhere on your body, there are about three feet of little blood vessels in there!
So if you get cut, you’re going to bleed.
But since a cut could let outside bacteria directly into your body, you need some kind of defense. And so a number of unusual blood cells named platelets arrive on the scene. They form a circle around your cut and start turning from liquid to jelly to a solid. As your blood clots, a scab is formed. Thanks, platelets!
Your face has so many blood vessels, however, that even healthy platelets can have a hard time healing a cut there. This is too bad for mixed-martial-arts fighters. They tend to get punched in the face a lot, so they are at high risk for having facial cuts. To avoid losing a match because of this, many of these tough guys turn to plastic surgery.
This is where corpses come in! First, dead skin is taken from a dead body. (What other kind of skin could it be?) Then a surgeon opens up the skin in the fighter’s face and removes any scar tissue, usually around the eyes. A one-square-centimeter piece of donor skin is then placed in the opening and stitched back over! Amazingly, the dead-skin implant then gets absorbed back into the patient’s own skin. And the odds are much lower for getting a cut on the same spot again.
Bad news! If you do get cut, you really shouldn’t let a vampire bat lick the wound. You see, these bats have an anti-coagulant in their spit that keeps a cut from scabbing up. (This allows the bat to keep drinking from an animal’s blood until the bat is nice and full.)
Once your cut has scabbed up, you may notice that it shrinks over time, causing some pinching of the skin. It’s almost like your body is trying to sew the wound back together. This is also likely to cause some itching to occur. It’s no coincidence that “scab” has its roots in the Latin word scabere: to scratch!
“This is all very interesting,” you say, “but where do scars come from?” Well, if your dog really twisted that spork into you, this cut might be so deep that even a hard-working scab can’t repair all the damage. In a case like this, the body has to form special connective tissue to take care of the problem. And after the flesh heals, it won’t look the same as it did before the injury, but at least you’ll have a cool spork scar.
We’ve covered what happens when a blood vessel gets cut. But what if it gets squished instead? For instance, if a baseball drills you in the thigh, your blood vessels will get crushed. The impact from the ball literally bursts the blood vessels inside your body, which causes internal bleeding. The result: a bruise!
A bruise usually starts out purple, or even greenish-blue. As your body sends white blood cells to the bruise to clean up the bloody mess, the bruise will change color to a strange type of yellow. I think the best kinds of bruises are the ones you can share with the world. Let’s say you’re playing basketball and you get elbowed in the face. That’s a good way to pick up a black eye, which is just a facial bruise. As it heals, everyone will get to see the bruise go through more color changes than a chameleon on a kaleidoscope!
Medical St
udents: What a Bunch of Cut-ups!
When it comes to treating human suffering, medical professionals are our front line of defense. Our doctors and nurses deal with life’s important stuff. Yes, it may be gross, but that’s not what’s important. So thank goodness these angels of medical mercy have studied up on how to treat the problems that afflict us all.
Of course, there’s something very wrong with these people. Who would want to study grotesque horrors? For example, let’s look at the logical, precise way doctors are taught today. Imagine a group of medical students walking into a classroom. The one I have in mind is known as the gross anatomy lab, or “gross lab” for short. (Seriously.) The classroom is already set up with rows of decapitated human heads sitting on roasting pans.
