Nerves != Blood Vessels

If you are a medical student this post is definitely not for you. I’ve just learnt about this fact and wanted to post about it. Please skip this one.

Yes!! They aren’t the same. I always thought nerve is just a synonym for blood vessel but looks like I’m wrong all this time.

Blood Vessels are essentially the pipes that carry blood from organs to heart and vice versa.

Nerves are the hotlines between brain and organs. Whenever brain wants to have a chat, it uses these direct lines to talk to whichever organ it wants. Basically its the boss that orders every organ how to work (Faster/Slower).

So based on the definition I though both Nerves and blood vessels should be equally important for the functioning of Human body right?

Wrong!!!! During internal organ transplant, doctors don’t join nerves back like they do blood vessels. They just staple them or burn at the end to stop any blood loss and close up. Apparently we can’t join nerves yet.

But what if brain wants to command heart about beating slow or fast?

Sadly it can’t do that after the transplant. It has to rely on the secondary mode of transportation, Harmones. It has to release Harmones to blood stream and wait for heart to pick up the harmone, analyse and then go fast or slow.

Same happens to all involuntary organs. Their only way of communication to the kind of the body is indirect only.

Should feel really sad for the brain to loose all that power and wait like everyone else. But hey! Look at the bright side. It has something to talk to. Better than not being able to command at all.

Looks like organ transplant doctors are like the programmers that try to replace a deprecated adapter in existing production environment that has been stable for a decade and just endup with a lot of commented out code and a new adapter that just doesn’t fully support legacy systems.

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