Dr. Chatenay

What is a surgeon?

Sometimes when people get sick, their internal organs aren't working properly, I use special instruments and I can fix the internal organs. For instance, by removing an appendix, it will make you feel better.

The Digestive System: What we have inside our body is a system of organs that takes our food and breaks it down into tiny little pieces so that all of our body parts can use those little pieces to grow and give strength and give energy. 

The teeth and mouth is the first part of your digestion system. The tongue helps you to mix your food up. It has taste buds to tell you if the food is salty or sweet. The tongue mixes your food up with saliva to lubricates your food and make it easier to swallow. 

The swallowing tube is the esophagus, which squeezes your food down into your stomach.  The stomach squeezes and mixes the food with acid and enzymes to make the food into smaller pieces. Then it squeezed it down into the small intestine. It's a long tube, about 20 feet long and it's all coiled up in loops inside your body. The food gets broken down more and more as it travels through the intestine. The little tiny particles of food are being absorbed into your blood stream. The blood is being pumped by the heart to all the parts of your body - to your brain, to your heart, to your skin, to your muscles. All those little pieces of food are being absorbed and being used by those tissues to help you grow, give you energy and strength. 

What's left, then, in the small intestine when it gets to the end of it, is food that your body is not able to use, like waste material. That gets put into the last part of the digestive system which is called the large intestine, or the colon. The main job is to store the waste materials until you can find a convenient time and place to get rid of your waste. It also absorbs water into your blood stream as well. 

The liver and pancreas are also part of the digestive system. The pancreas makes chemicals that digest food and it also make insulin, a special chemical to help you digest sugar. The liver makes another lot of chemicals to absorb fat. 

Sitting down here by the large intestine is a little thing called the appendix. In some people, the appendix becomes big and fat and inflamed. I am able to take this out of your body to help you feel better. 

Some organs can be transplanted: heart, liver, pancreas, kidney, and lungs, but not brains.

The heart is divided into four parts, atriums and ventricles. Blood comes into your heart from veins, and goes out from the heart through your arteries. If you make a fist, that's about the size and shape of your heart. It's a muscle that pumps blood through your body.

Surgeons use special instruments of different sizes and sharpness to do special things. 

Most of the internal part of your body is red. Some are different colors - your gall bladder is a green-blue color because it's full of a green chemical called bile, your pancreas is a brown yellow color, your liver is sort of a brown red color. The most common color is red, because of the red from the blood that goes through.

Vocal chords all like elastic bands inside your voice box. Those elastic bands are attached to muscles that tighten or looser. If the muscles are relaxed your voice is deeper, and if they are tighter, your voice is higher.

How do you grow?

When you grow... we'll start with a bone. There is a growth plate, and as you grow, the bone becomes calcified which makes it hard. The bones get bigger and longer, and your muscle and skin grows with it. 

In every moving joint, there are muscles that work opposite to each other. Muscles can only shorten and then relax. Another muscle needs to move it in the opposite direction.

Cells in the body are different. Muscles cells go up and down. Heart muscle cells are different, because they can shorten in many directions.

Your brain can do millions of things at once. Your brain stem is telling you to breathe and your heart to beat. As you go farther out into the brain, there's parts that tells your muscles to move, parts that sense taste, temperature, taste, and parts for vision, smell.

How is your brain smart?

No one knows what makes one person smart at certain things. What we do know is that every brain in every person has something unique and good about it. The brain communicates by cells - the axon is the long part that has a special part that has chemicals in it. Another brain cell has receptors, to catch the chemicals (neurotransmitters), and that cell gets the information. This is called a synapse. Every brain works different from everyone else's.

Why do people yawn?

We'll start with the trachea, which breaks up into the lungs. If you go right the very end of the lung, we have sacs called alveoli. When we take a breath, air comes down here. For our lungs to work properly, these sacks have to be open. If they don't open, they collapse and your lungs don't work properly. One of the theories behind the yawn, you take a deep breathe, and open up the little sacs to help you breather better.

How do you see color?

It's hard to see color at night. The eyeball. The lens helps people focus the light. The light comes in and hits the back of the eye called the retina. There are two main kinds of cells at the back of the eye - rods and cones. Rods are little cells that can tell the brain white. When the cell is not working it tells the brain black. Cones can tell the brain what color. At night, when you looking at a start at night, it disappears after awhile. But if you look a little bit away, you can see it again. The light hits a macula, a special spot, there are a lot of cones, but not many rods. There's not enough light for the cones to work, but not very many rods to do the work. The cells get tired and haven't recovered enough to let the brain know. There is aqueous fluid at the front of the eye and vitreous fluid to help protect the back of the eye from too much light.