Bring me the head of Diego Garcia...and the Mayor of Addu Atoll too!

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

You (or anyone else) has reproductive organs in your chest? Eww...[X(]

Reproductive in the more general sense...as in inception, gestation or sustenance of life [:'(]

Or a 529 savings plan?

[Cap Mandrake]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake



Reproductive in the more general sense...as in inception, gestation or sustenance of life [:'(]

Or a 529 savings plan?

That makes no sense...well maybe 403-b plans would count.

Cysticercus fanboy [:'(]

[Cap Mandrake]

**********La Foa airfield, May 28, 1942********


A number of USAAF personel are putting the finishing touches on the field repair of a B-25 rudder. A man in an officer's uniform approaches. He is covered in dust and mosquito bites.

Tall hirsute officer: Goddamnit! Major Major, is that you?

Major Major Major: Yes, Yossarian, it's me.

Tall hirsute officer: Well, I'll be damned. How did you get here?

Major Major Major: I hitched a ride on a damaged Stuart.

Tall hirsute officer: No kidding? Hey, I scrounged some fuel. When we get this tail fixed we are going to try for Fiji. McWatt and his crew are coming too in their bird. Even Cathcart is coming. We got him an empty paint can to use as a latrine on the trip.

Major Major Major: I think I'll wait for the boat.

Tall hirsute officer: You crazy SOB, there isn't going to be a boat. It's a Jap lake out there.

Major Major Major: Still.

Tall hirsute officer: Suit yourself, you crazy SOB. See you next war. <the major trudges off in a daze>....Doc, have you got anything to knock him out?...................

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

Cysticercus fanboy [:'(]

A perennial favorite! Worms, cysts and brains! What an awesome lifecycle! [&o]

ETA: If this doesn't make your scalp itch, nothing will.

[Cap Mandrake]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

Cysticercus fanboy [:'(]

A perennial favorite! Worms, cysts and brains! What an awesome lifecycle! [&o]

ETA: If this doesn't make your scalp itch, nothing will.

They are vermin. One time I accidentally stuck a spinal needle (during a spinal tap) directly into a cysticercus lesion in the lumbar subarachnoid space of a teenager from Mexico with 104 fever and bad headache. I was pretty sure the needle was in the right place but I got back stuff that looked like old cream cheese. Talk about pucker factor. Madre de Dios!

The racemose variant is something out of science fiction.

[witpqs]

Curable?

[Chickenboy]

Most of the time, as I understand it, yes. Provided there aren't too many cysts in particularly important areas of the brain. It depends on the severity of infection. The picture I've included above was obviously collected from a postmortem examination.

My former boss, a Mexican national, told me about some of the veterinary field exams that they conducted on rural pork growers' animals. Let's just say that 'marbling' of pork in some countries is not a desirous trait.

ETA: Cap'n-how'd your case turn out?

[sprior]

JJ has withdrawn from Kunming, looks like Op Buggritt is bearing fruit already.

[princep01]

Looking at the above pictorial of Burma and China, could someone explain why the Japanese units are pinkish in some cases and a deep red in others. Is this some sort of visual aid in supply status or strength? I've never been able to learn what that means. Thanks and sorry for the intrusion on your excellent AAR.

[Nemo121]

witpqs,

Once a bit of brain is eaten away then, generally speaking, that's it. Could you survive? Yes but with lots of functionality lost.

[rtrapasso]

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

witpqs,

Once a bit of brain is eaten away then, generally speaking, that's it. Could you survive? Yes but with lots of functionality lost.

The brain exhibits amazing "plasticity" in function (yes, it's a medical word), especially in the young... there have been case where 1/2 the brain has been lost but the patient recovered without noticeable deficit... much depends on the speed of the injury in most cases... patients can have slowly growing tumors in the cranial cavity that reach alarming size without much in the way of symptoms. In several cases i've seen, the patient may actually die due to the brain being pushed out of the skull before anyone realizes anything goes wrong ("uncal herniation" = fatal).

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: princep01

Looking at the above pictorial of Burma and China, could someone explain why the Japanese units are pinkish in some cases and a deep red in others. Is this some sort of visual aid in supply status or strength? I've never been able to learn what that means. Thanks and sorry for the intrusion on your excellent AAR.

I think it's (deeper hue) supposed to mean that the units are more deeply entrenched (fortified).

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: rtrapasso

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

witpqs,

Once a bit of brain is eaten away then, generally speaking, that's it. Could you survive? Yes but with lots of functionality lost.

The brain exhibits amazing "plasticity" in function (yes, it's a medical word), especially in the young... there have been case where 1/2 the brain has been lost but the patient recovered without noticeable deficit... much depends on the speed of the injury in most cases... patients can have slowly growing tumors in the cranial cavity that reach alarming size without much in the way of symptoms. In several cases i've seen, the patient may actually die due to the brain being pushed out of the skull before anyone realizes anything was wrong ("uncal herniation" = fatal).

Thanks, Bob.

Nemo, in addition to what Bob mentioned (which I knew but perhaps not to that extent) I also meant if even discovered when mild.

[sprior]

I think it's (deeper hue) supposed to mean that the units are more deeply entrenched (fortified).

I thought it was detection levels.

[sprior]

Thanks and sorry for the intrusion on your excellent AAR.

Please ask away, we don't know it all/much* either.

*Again, delete that which does not apply.

[Nemo121]

Re: brain damage - aka ABI - aquired brain injury

Plasticity is a feature of the brain but it is dependent on:
a) age - the younger the more plastic,
b) extent of injury - the less the injury the easier to compensate
c) rapidity of injury - the slower the injury and less catastrophic in nature the more plasticity occurs in which other elements of the brain take over portions of the function of the damaged portion of the brain
d) rehab - for plasticity to occur you need to practice whatever it is you seek to recover. With practice more is recovered then without practice although this is a bit shaded by practice also allowing existing neurons to "do more with less" without plasticity becoming involved.
e) the area damaged. A pontine CVA rarely, if ever, has much recovery, grey and white matter infarcts in the temporo-parietal regions have a better prognosis although even then some significant deficits will still remain. E.g You might recover your hearing but you might still go psychotic.

witpqs,
Believe it or not what you saw above was relatively mild. I've seen brains ( post-mortem ) with holes the size of golf balls throughout. Once treated an Eastern European man who had undiagnosed cerebral TB which essentially ate away his entire frontal lobe - where your executive functioning and personality are based - and, over the course of 4 days, turned from an adult 30some year old male into the equivalent of a 3 or 4 year old with no power of speech, no ability to toilet himself etc. The CT Brain showed the replacement of the frontal lobes with a ball of pus. Pretty horrific thing to see. Even worse when I had to break it to his wife and kid. Wife had no english, it was an emergency so I had to use the 10 year old kid to translate for me. Pretty sure he'll be traumatised for life "Tell your mother your father's brain has been eaten and he WILL die. " *sigh*

Basically if you can actually see a lesion on the brain with the naked eye in a post-mortem shot like that then you can be pretty sure it wasn't a mild injury. It isn't a perfect rule of thumb but it is pretty good.

Also, if you are looking to determine whether or not something will impact intellect then look at the outer portion of the brain, the 0.5cm closest to the surface. That's where "grey matter" lies. If you find damage there then you are losing stuff which is very hard to replace as that stuff is what "thinks" and decides on actions and movements. As you go deeper you get into white matter which is, essentially, lots of pipelines carrying the data from the grey matter to the spine where it can get transmitted. If you've got damage in the white matter and you can reroute the signals ( not easy but possible ) then you've got no loss of function. If they grey matter is FUBAR then plasticity comes into play but, really, I wouldn't be hopeful.

Interestingly a particular stroke in a particular portion of the white matter where all the motor pipelines pass throughleads to locked in syndrome. All your intellect is preserved, your sensation is preserved, you just can't move a muscle. *shudder*. That's real voluntary euthanasia territory for me.

[VSWG]

ORIGINAL: princep01

Looking at the above pictorial of Burma and China, could someone explain why the Japanese units are pinkish in some cases and a deep red in others. Is this some sort of visual aid in supply status or strength? I've never been able to learn what that means. Thanks and sorry for the intrusion on your excellent AAR.

Darker color = more troops

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

witpqs,

Once a bit of brain is eaten away then, generally speaking, that's it. Could you survive? Yes but with lots of functionality lost.

Far as I know, the cerebrum, in particular has a lot of residual reserve. Many people with sizeable brain tumors, cysticercoid cysts, etc. make complete functional recoveries. It is an unusual and strange organ in that sense.

[Nemo121]

Ah but brain tumours grow and PRESS on brain tissue, once you cut out the tumour and relieve the pressure the brain can recover because it was the pressure which stopped that bit of the brain working. That portion of the brain wasn't destroyed, just rendered disabled due to pressure.

Same thing with cysts.

Worms, on the other hand, eat and destroy brain tissues. That's a major difference. Something which creates pressure on other bits of the brain can be removed and one should expect almost full recovery. Once a bit of brain is actually destroyed though, that's a different story.

[rtrapasso]

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

Ah but brain tumours grow and PRESS on brain tissue, once you cut out the tumour and relieve the pressure the brain can recover because it was the pressure which stopped that bit of the brain working. That portion of the brain wasn't destroyed, just rendered disabled due to pressure.

Same thing with cysts.

Worms, on the other hand, eat and destroy brain tissues. That's a major difference. Something which creates pressure on other bits of the brain can be removed and one should expect almost full recovery. Once a bit of brain is actually destroyed though, that's a different story.

i would disagree... again, there are well documented cases where an entire cerebral HEMISPHERE was removed surgically, and the patient made a full recovery (children, yes, but even adults can show amazing recovery even when large chunks of the cerebral cortex are destroyed).

Similarly, patients can sustain gunshot wounds to the head where large chunks of grey matter are destroyed acutely, and still recover without residual... i am not saying this is COMMON (it is actually rare), but it does occur.

Also, i don't think Cysticercus worms actually "eat" the brain: they are walled off in encapsulated cysts and grow slowly absorbing nutrients from the blood, iirc.