[Why I hate the pancreas and you should too.]
The pancreas is the crybaby of organs.
Take its neighbor the liver, for instance. You can beat the hell out of the liver (“Bottoms up!”), but if you ask for forgiveness early enough and pinky swear to be nice, it will sometimes give you a do-over and actually regenerate its own cells. How polite is that?
Colon cancer is bad, but you can detect it early, and it progresses slowly (good), and they can cut out a chunk of your six-foot long intestine and you’ll still be fine. Hodgkin lymphoma, prostate, testicular, melanoma, breast and thyroid cancer—I wouldn’t wish those diseases on anyone, but most people survive with the proper treatment.
But the pancreas is a little asshole of an organ. Most of us don’t know what it does and where it exists in our bodies. So it’s burdened with resentment that manifests as bad behavior. If you asked someone to tell you where the pancreas was, it would be like watching an American trying to find Ukraine on a map. If you asked someone to tell you what it does, it’d be like asking them to explain what this contraption is. The pancreas is not one of the popular kids, so it pouts in the corner of the schoolyard plotting its violent revenge. (“It was such a quiet organ. We never saw this coming.”)
The pancreas is very important. It secretes enzymes that allow the body to absorb nutrients. So technically, you could find pancreatic cancer very early. Losing weight unintentionally, especially muscle mass, could be a sign of pancreatic problems. In fact, the weight loss can sometimes emerge years before other symptoms. But who connects weight loss to emerging pancreatic cancer? No one. And the asshole pancreas hides its cancer cells so well that when you eventually find them, it’s already angrily shaking its fist at you.
The pancreas is such an asshole, when it gets angry, it can unleash a sudden torrent of pain that reaches an 11 on the hospital “how-would-you-rate-your-pain” scale. If you like morphine or Dilaudid, show up at an ER with pancreatitis and they will fix you right up. Three times my pancreas has swelled up, laying me low in a matter of minutes. Twice I went to the ER; the third time, I curled up on the floor of my office and waited an hour for the Tylenol to kick in. The thought of it returning haunts me.
The pancreas is such an asshole that its pain will sometimes trick doctors into first thinking you have gallstones (I wish) or liver problems (I sort of wish). The pancreas is such an asshole that it will sometimes hide its tumor behind other organs—the harder to find you, my little dearie.
The pancreas is such an asshole, it even makes it hard for us to fix. Its head sits near critical blood vessels that can block the surgeon’s scalpel. And when you can do surgery on the pancreas, it’s so squishy and pudding-like that the surgical stitches sometimes slip apart. This was such a problem decades ago that one in five pancreas surgeries was unsuccessful.
To be fair to the pancreas, when it works, it does its job quietly and efficiently. Without it, you’d have diabetes. But I’ve got nothing nice to say about my crybaby pancreas and its defective little bastard cells. Just the two words that title this post.