Hello there. This is Mich, chronic procrastinator, amateur writer and squirrel-in-training. Things you can find in my blog? Long-ass text posts, videogame rants, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, Supernatural, porn (I'll be nice and tag it nsfw though) and general fangirling. If you'd still like this blog to grace your dashboard, thanks! I really can't see why you'd do that.
I love how on Hannibal there are no limits to the kind of fucked-up shit that could happen to people, but the show makes sure that we know that the dogs are all ok
I’ve seen this photograph very frequently on tumblr and Facebook, always with the simple caption, “Ghost Heart”. What exactly is a ghost heart?
More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won’t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.
The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you’re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.
Then inject that ghost heart, as it’s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.
Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this— first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years.
The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place.
This scaffold of connective tissue - called a “ghost organ” for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient’s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection.
This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient’s stem cells so a new heart - one that won’t be rejected - can be grown.
It’s a beautiful evening in February. My wife and I are sitting at the fireplace, when suddenly a terrible image appears on the screen of my computer.
My wife looks at me. As I look in her terrified, cardboard eyes, filled with tears, she takes a deep breath, before saying with her shivering voice “It’s what you’ve always wanted, dear. Do it.” My hands start shaking and a lone tear rolls down my cheek. “I can’t, honey. I’m not like that anymore.” “I will do it.” a small voice behind us says. As I turn around, my eyes cross with my son; our son. “You don’t have to do this, Benedict.” I say, as I hold his hands.
Ignoring what I told him, young Benedict Popper-Are Optional holds my wife’s cardboard body in one hand, and her long, beautiful string in the other. With tears in my eyes, I turn my head away. A loud pop sounds behind me and I watch in terror as I see my wife’s confetti spread across the room.
“It’s what you’ve always wanted, dad…” my son says, putting his small, cardboard hand on my shoulder. “Yes,” I say, “but not like this… Never like this…”
me: this anime brutally ripped out my heart and tore it to shreds then stomped it into the ground as i drowned in a sea of my tears and basked in eternal sorrow
