Word: stoma
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...Rosette. This opening (technically a "stoma," or mouth) was surrounded by a rosette of mucous membrane-part of the stomach lining. Because gastric juice tended to leak from the stoma, Tom had to keep it covered with a piece of absorbent gauze. Proud and sensitive, Tom managed to keep the secret of his feeding difficulty from all but his closest friends, got through six grades of parochial school, even played backyard football. He went to work first as a plumber's helper, married and had a daughter...
...irritated the delicate membrane of his rosette that he had to have an operation. Recovery was slow, and Tom had to go on relief. Up to that time he had not let doctors study him, because of his sensitive feelings. Doctors were callously more interested in his stoma and stomach than in him. He refused to be a human guinea pig. But in 1941 at New York Hospital, Drs. Harold G. Wolff and Stewart Wolf made a deal: on their payroll, Tom would spend his mornings as a subject of medical study, his afternoons as a handyman around the laboratory...
Pink & Relaxed. So fruitful was this association that m 1943 Wolf and Wolff published the most momentous study of digestion since Beaumont's: Human Gastric Function (updated in 1947). They had investigated not only the stoma and stomach but, by the psychosomatic approach, the whole man. They showed that Tom's stomach, when he was at ease, was pale pink and relaxed, with many convoluted folds, but bright red, smooth and tense when he became angry. Fright turned both Tom's face and his stomach pale. By shutting off the flow of gastric juices, depression made...
...used to be shy even with doctors because, when he went to have the opening (medical name: stoma) treated, doctors appeared more interested in the stoma than in Tom. Once when a doctor left him for a moment to call in colleagues, Tom disappeared from the examining table. After that he would let doctors listen to his chest and look down his throat, but he would not let them look at his stoma nor peer through it at his stomach...
Reluctant Guinea Pig. Some of Tom's stomach lining protruded in a rosette around the stoma. To absorb this membrane's secretions and the occasional leakage from inside, Tom wore a gauze bandage between meals. Sometimes the bandage irritated the rosette and it bled a little. When Tom worked as a sewer laborer during the depression, the bleeding got so bad that he had to let a surgeon remove some of the bleeding tissue. The convalescence was long and Tom had to go on relief. This hurt his pride-he had always managed to support his family...
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