You know, when you take away one of someone’s senses (eyesight, hearing, etc.), the other senses become stronger to compensate for whichever sense happens to be slacking off.
Many people aren’t aware of this, but a similar concept applies to limbs.
When famous outdoorsman Aron Ralston was forced to amputate his own arm after bungling himself into quite the pickle, something pretty wild happened (and it wasn’t the self-amputation) that you likely haven’t heard about.
No, his other arm didn’t get stronger. Our limbs don’t work like that (I said the concept was SIMILAR to our senses; I didn’t say that it was identical—I chose my words very deliberately).
However, his digestive system, not yet having grown accustomed to the sudden loss of an arm, continued pumping out the same amount of protein as prior to the amputation. Because the body takes time to readjust to such unanticipated and drastic changes, this body didn’t know that, on a go-forward basis, it should only absorb 90-95% of the nutrients that it did prior to the amputation, because it no longer has to maintain all of the muscle in his right arm. In a sense, his body was unexpectedly forced to deal with a “surplus” of newly forming muscle.
So, what happened?
Well, all that digested protein had to go somewhere and, at this point, the wound had healed over with a new layer of skin.
Excretion wasn’t an option because the body continued hanging onto the muscle and fat, erroneously thinking it was needed for his arm (which was now gone). So, the tissue arrived at the location of Ralston’s stump and, much like a newly orphaned child, it had nowhere to go.
As a result, after a few weeks, muscle and fat began to store up in this region. After the skin closed up, the new flesh continued to sort of “spill” into the stump. I imagine this would have looked kind of like what happens when fat guys take off their belts on Thanksgiving (doesn’t the whole belly just sort of “rush” to the area?).
Now, Aron Ralston has a massive, fleshy sack of fat dangling where his muscular arm once was. His brain still doesn’t know to stop producing muscle and fat for his arm, so his fleshy-arm-sack will likely continue to grow, unfortunately.
Science predicts that, by the year 2023, Ralston’s fleshy-arm-sack will be so tremendous that it will be larger than he is. Harvard architecture students are currently working on designing a comically large skateboard that will allow Ralston to maintain his active lifestyle while rolling his fleshy-arm-sack on the giant skateboard alongside him.
Until next time,
Michael J. Erickson, CEO & Co-Founder
