Why Wynn got an A in anatomy
My family grew up with the Martins. My parents are Wynn and Scott’s godparents, as Perry and Sherry are to me and my brother. However, I never really got to know Wynn until 2001 when I moved into an apartment one block over from his. Eating Mexican food at Pico’s while telling offensive yet hysterical butt jokes and poop stories was a favorite pastimes of ours. I remember the time he got 2 tickets and took me to the Vagina Monologues when it came to the Alley – that was an experience. One of the many things I loved about Wynn was the hilarious e-mails he was famous for sending. Below is one of the best I ever received, sent March 27, 2003:
________
Okay, here's the essay I wrote out by hand on my Tuesday exam in anatomy. Yes, I wrote this out in class off the top of my head, and yeah, my hand was cramped for a day.
Q: You have just eaten a Big Mac. Discuss the path that it will take through the digestive system to include all of the physiological processes that occur along the way. (25 pts).
A: “So You Ate a Big Mac, eh Mr. Vegetarian?”
You have just eaten a Big Mac. You are a terrible, terrible vegetarian, and you will pay for your mistake.
The trouble all began with the cephalic stage of gastic digestion, when you smelled a Big Mac and those fries. You walked into a McDonalds—not to buy a Big Mac, of course; you just got off your ass, turned off the TV, got in your car and drove to McDonalds because you love their salad. YEAH. But when you GOT there, and smelled them frying beef patties, you couldn’t help yourself. And that’s not YOUR fault; your brain just turned on the cephalic stage of gastric digestion. You didn’t INTEND to start salivating; it just HAPPENED. So then, hell: you hat to put a burger in it.
And, heh, it was good. You got so worked up that you started masticating, right there in front of God and the world. Anyone could have seen you, and you looked guiltily around as you shoved it into your mucin-lubricated oral cavity. Inside, salivary amylase began to break down complex carbohydrates in the sesame-seed bun, and you gnawed the dead flesh of a once-living bovine, one of God’s beautiful creatures, into a stinking bolus of mashed-up, undigested sin. You began the voluntary phase of swallowing. Voluntary, because you didn’t HAVE to swallow it, but you did. You did. You DID.
Next, your pharynx went up, your soft palate went up, and the beef went down. Down, down past your epiglottis, which got in the way to steer that steer not down your trachea but into your esophagus. Down, propelled downward by peristalsis, down toward your stomach, down, down, toward Hell.
That Big Mac landed in your stomach, distending it with your gluttonous excess, until the gastric phase of gastric phase of gastric digestion began. “How redundant,” you thought, “gastric phase of gastric digestion,”as you tried to push from your mind the images of singing Blue Bell cows, the selfless bovine ladies who all believe Brenham is Heaven.
Gastrin stimulates secretion of hydrochloric acid, which kills bacteria left on your burger by the unwashed hands of a 42-year-old man who earns minimum wage turning Blue Bell cows into burgers each day at McDonalds. Intrinsic factor, also secreted in the stomach, searches your Big Mac in vain for vitamin B12 to protect, any B12. Pepsinogen, from your chief cells, is turned by HCl into pepsin, and begins work on the protein—protein that was once… a singing cow.
Your stomach churned, spurred on by gastrin and by guilt, to mix and churn your food, until finally your pyloric sphincter, disgusted by this insurrection, surrendered your acidic chime to the duodenum. Now, there would be no turning back.
The acidic pH of your nasty, nasty chime, somewhere around 2, triggered your offended duodenum to secrete secretin. “How redundant,” your mind began; shut up, carnivore! YOU did this. Secretin shut your gastric processes down, and stimulated secretion of pancreatic bicarbonates, which helped neutralize the evil low pH inside your duodenum. Cholecystokinin, stimulated by the stunning quantities of lipids and fatty acids in your newly murderous diet, in turn called upon the pancreas, desperate for secretion of its enzymes, and forced contraction of the gallbladder. Festering, putrid bile oozed and squirted forth to emulsify the fat.
At the brush border of the cells of your suffering duodenum, interokinase cleaved pancreatic trypsinogen into activated trypsin, which in turn, reluctantly, activated chymotrypsin from chymotrypsinogen, and activated other pancreatic enzymes. Through the duodenum and into the jejunum, peptidases broke down proteins, lipases broke down fats; pancreatic amylase broke carbohydrates down to disaccharides, and various enzymes—lactase, maltase, sucrase—struggled to reduce those to simple monosaccharides. Your system, whether because it could not emulsify so much fat, or find long-unused lactase to attach the “cheese,” didn't finish with the fats, and let you know it.
You knew the moment all that chime turned for the jejunum, and again as it rounded a turn to the ileum. You could feel, and hear, EVERY TURN IT MADE. This… would not be good.
The water in your meal was mostly absorbed in there, by osmosis. What few vitamins and minerals could be found between the fats and lips and hooves of Blue Bell cows were snatched up by diffusion, while monosaccharides were actively transported into the epithelial cells of your small intestine. Those nutrients were drawn, along with amino acids, into the hepatic portal system and shipped off to your liver, which struggled to pretend they might have come from hummus, or dolmades, as it synthesized fresh glucose and other compounds from the sinful, tainted crap you'd eaten.
The fats didn't have it so good. Your overwhelmed, vegetarian system fought to break them down, fought to reassemble trigycerides inside your cells, fought to find co-transport proteins with which to bind them, that they might be shoved to your lacteals and whisked away with lymph, to be dumped elsewhere, far away, in some distant, left, subclavian vein, someone else’s problem then, no longer in your gut.
Fought, and failed. Sure, many of those fats were whisked away, but no small few escaped, sliding, writhing down your ileum, propelled by peristalsis, driven on by DESIRE, the burning, evil desire to make you shit like you had never shat before.
What little vitamin A, D, E and K might have been in that Happy Meal was still bound to that fat, and would soon be leaving the building. Mass movements, accompanied by sounds that might have been the final movement of some fetid symphony of insidious intent, propelled the slimy, fatty feces fatefully forward, building in the rectum, building, BUILDING, as a reflex from the unholy sacral region spurred on wave after contracting wave, relaxing your internal anal sphincter as you raced toward home, sending spasms through your colon as you ran red lights and slammed into the trash cans in your driveway, pumping almost liquid UnHappy Meal to the borders of your straining, clenched, external anal sphincter, until you finally lost your conscious control thereof, eleven feet shy of your first-floor bathroom. It would be the last Big Mac you ever saw.
________
Wynn, I will miss the way you would make me scream with laughter. You were a true friend.
Sarah Morin
________
Okay, here's the essay I wrote out by hand on my Tuesday exam in anatomy. Yes, I wrote this out in class off the top of my head, and yeah, my hand was cramped for a day.
Q: You have just eaten a Big Mac. Discuss the path that it will take through the digestive system to include all of the physiological processes that occur along the way. (25 pts).
A: “So You Ate a Big Mac, eh Mr. Vegetarian?”
You have just eaten a Big Mac. You are a terrible, terrible vegetarian, and you will pay for your mistake.
The trouble all began with the cephalic stage of gastic digestion, when you smelled a Big Mac and those fries. You walked into a McDonalds—not to buy a Big Mac, of course; you just got off your ass, turned off the TV, got in your car and drove to McDonalds because you love their salad. YEAH. But when you GOT there, and smelled them frying beef patties, you couldn’t help yourself. And that’s not YOUR fault; your brain just turned on the cephalic stage of gastric digestion. You didn’t INTEND to start salivating; it just HAPPENED. So then, hell: you hat to put a burger in it.
And, heh, it was good. You got so worked up that you started masticating, right there in front of God and the world. Anyone could have seen you, and you looked guiltily around as you shoved it into your mucin-lubricated oral cavity. Inside, salivary amylase began to break down complex carbohydrates in the sesame-seed bun, and you gnawed the dead flesh of a once-living bovine, one of God’s beautiful creatures, into a stinking bolus of mashed-up, undigested sin. You began the voluntary phase of swallowing. Voluntary, because you didn’t HAVE to swallow it, but you did. You did. You DID.
Next, your pharynx went up, your soft palate went up, and the beef went down. Down, down past your epiglottis, which got in the way to steer that steer not down your trachea but into your esophagus. Down, propelled downward by peristalsis, down toward your stomach, down, down, toward Hell.
That Big Mac landed in your stomach, distending it with your gluttonous excess, until the gastric phase of gastric phase of gastric digestion began. “How redundant,” you thought, “gastric phase of gastric digestion,”as you tried to push from your mind the images of singing Blue Bell cows, the selfless bovine ladies who all believe Brenham is Heaven.
Gastrin stimulates secretion of hydrochloric acid, which kills bacteria left on your burger by the unwashed hands of a 42-year-old man who earns minimum wage turning Blue Bell cows into burgers each day at McDonalds. Intrinsic factor, also secreted in the stomach, searches your Big Mac in vain for vitamin B12 to protect, any B12. Pepsinogen, from your chief cells, is turned by HCl into pepsin, and begins work on the protein—protein that was once… a singing cow.
Your stomach churned, spurred on by gastrin and by guilt, to mix and churn your food, until finally your pyloric sphincter, disgusted by this insurrection, surrendered your acidic chime to the duodenum. Now, there would be no turning back.
The acidic pH of your nasty, nasty chime, somewhere around 2, triggered your offended duodenum to secrete secretin. “How redundant,” your mind began; shut up, carnivore! YOU did this. Secretin shut your gastric processes down, and stimulated secretion of pancreatic bicarbonates, which helped neutralize the evil low pH inside your duodenum. Cholecystokinin, stimulated by the stunning quantities of lipids and fatty acids in your newly murderous diet, in turn called upon the pancreas, desperate for secretion of its enzymes, and forced contraction of the gallbladder. Festering, putrid bile oozed and squirted forth to emulsify the fat.
At the brush border of the cells of your suffering duodenum, interokinase cleaved pancreatic trypsinogen into activated trypsin, which in turn, reluctantly, activated chymotrypsin from chymotrypsinogen, and activated other pancreatic enzymes. Through the duodenum and into the jejunum, peptidases broke down proteins, lipases broke down fats; pancreatic amylase broke carbohydrates down to disaccharides, and various enzymes—lactase, maltase, sucrase—struggled to reduce those to simple monosaccharides. Your system, whether because it could not emulsify so much fat, or find long-unused lactase to attach the “cheese,” didn't finish with the fats, and let you know it.
You knew the moment all that chime turned for the jejunum, and again as it rounded a turn to the ileum. You could feel, and hear, EVERY TURN IT MADE. This… would not be good.
The water in your meal was mostly absorbed in there, by osmosis. What few vitamins and minerals could be found between the fats and lips and hooves of Blue Bell cows were snatched up by diffusion, while monosaccharides were actively transported into the epithelial cells of your small intestine. Those nutrients were drawn, along with amino acids, into the hepatic portal system and shipped off to your liver, which struggled to pretend they might have come from hummus, or dolmades, as it synthesized fresh glucose and other compounds from the sinful, tainted crap you'd eaten.
The fats didn't have it so good. Your overwhelmed, vegetarian system fought to break them down, fought to reassemble trigycerides inside your cells, fought to find co-transport proteins with which to bind them, that they might be shoved to your lacteals and whisked away with lymph, to be dumped elsewhere, far away, in some distant, left, subclavian vein, someone else’s problem then, no longer in your gut.
Fought, and failed. Sure, many of those fats were whisked away, but no small few escaped, sliding, writhing down your ileum, propelled by peristalsis, driven on by DESIRE, the burning, evil desire to make you shit like you had never shat before.
What little vitamin A, D, E and K might have been in that Happy Meal was still bound to that fat, and would soon be leaving the building. Mass movements, accompanied by sounds that might have been the final movement of some fetid symphony of insidious intent, propelled the slimy, fatty feces fatefully forward, building in the rectum, building, BUILDING, as a reflex from the unholy sacral region spurred on wave after contracting wave, relaxing your internal anal sphincter as you raced toward home, sending spasms through your colon as you ran red lights and slammed into the trash cans in your driveway, pumping almost liquid UnHappy Meal to the borders of your straining, clenched, external anal sphincter, until you finally lost your conscious control thereof, eleven feet shy of your first-floor bathroom. It would be the last Big Mac you ever saw.
________
Wynn, I will miss the way you would make me scream with laughter. You were a true friend.
Sarah Morin
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