Hydrocephalus,Meningocele,Bow Leg and Gravity

Few days back,I saw this baby in the pediatric surgery ..She was cute and adorable.Everybody in that ward loves her..She was in that ward because she had hydrocephalus ,meningocele and genu venum.But one thing was uncommon for her and the rest of the babies and kids in the ward;she was on a table, in the nurse's room all the time..I just wonder why whenever I saw her  there on the same spot.At times,different people will be playing with her and she will be playing with them too..That's the beauty of that baby.She still didn't know that world is full of shitty humans and treat everyone like her family..She seldom cries,most of the time will be smiling and blurrrr at moments-babies nature.

Later I got to know that,the baby's mother abandoned her on the 6th floor of the hospital covered with clothes and the reason was because the baby looks abnormal.That's what everyone said and  with the baby's condition,the mother  might felt such way.That what poverty and illiteracy does to human,

Meningocele is a type of spina bifida.Well spina bifida is a birth defect where there is incomplete closing of the backbone and membranes around the spinal cord and  meningocele typically causes mild problems with a sac of fluid present at the gap in the spine.Usually during pregnancy, amniocentesis can reveal about this condition marked by high alpha- feto protein level.USG and medical imaging helps too.The fucked up thing about meningocele is that it will bring it's friends along such as hydrocephalus and bow leg together in many cases..Hydrocephalus is the abnormal accumulation of CSF in brain.With the increase of intra cranial pressure,there will be progressive enlargement of the skull and one of the common cause for hydrocephalus is spina bifida..When we look about bow leg,it is a physical deformity marked by outward bowing of the lower leg , giving the appearance of an archer's bow. Usually bilateral bow leg occurs in  rickets,while infection and tumor give rise to a one-sided bow-leggedness..-and the baby was suffering from unilateral bow legged which could be corrected with physiotherapy once she start to walk..

The interesting thing about bow leg reminds me about what will happen if babies were  born in space. Things will be more complicated if the fetus develops in space and is then born, so I will just talk about a pregnant woman flies in space and gives birth almost right away.When such circumstances occurs,the baby will be born pretty normal because it will develop in the womb very normally at Earth's gravity. What happens then is very interesting.

The bone cells are programmed to grow--they don't stop until you are a teenager or so. But it is gravity as a stress that makes the cells in the bones have the right alignment, or stack up properly and pull the bone so that it forms straight. Without gravity, the baby's bones won't get long and thin like adult bone. They will be very easy to break, and they won't grow as fast. This is true for arms and legs.

The bones at the top of the baby's head will actually grow thicker and stronger than on Earth. This is because your heart does not have to work so hard to move blood and other fluid from your feet to your upper body because there is no gravity. What happens is that the heart still pulls on the fluid in the legs, which now comes out much more easily. This causes the upper body to have more fluid and more pressure, which causes stress. Stress is always what makes bone grow and change. So, more pressure, more growth in the skull.

The bones in the hands will probably be normal because the baby/child/adult will use his hands just like on Earth. The feet will probably not grow much because they don't get the stress from having the weight of your whole body on them--no stress, not much growth. Ribs are interesting. Ribs protect your lungs and give support to your body so they don't collapse. They would probably be okay, but develop thinner than on Earth, so they wouldn't be nearly as strong. The spine is really going to be affected. The gravity won't push / pull down on you, so the vertebrae don't feel the stress, so they won't grow. But they will get stress from the spinal cord as it grows and pushes out. So you would probably end up with thinner, very easily crushed vertebrae.

Muscles work the same way. They need stress to grow and develop. Gravity is a stress force that pulls in one direction causing the muscle to develop in the right shape. So, if it is a muscle that won't be used much (say, the muscles that move your feet), they won't grow nearly as strong. Some muscles will be almost the same, such as your hand muscles. They aren't much affected by gravity--they are more affected by how the other muscles in your hands contract and release. They are stressed independently of gravity. Other muscles, like your heart, will be different. Your heart won't have to work as hard because there is no gravity to make blood circulation difficult. This takes a while to happen though. With a baby just born, probably the heart will never develop nearly as strong as a baby on Earth will.

Muscles and bones work together. The muscles are attached to bone, and they are very tightly connected. If you exercise a muscle, it pulls on the bone and causes a pulling stress. This helps the bone grow stronger in that area. This is why kids are told to play around outside when they are young--their bones grow very fast and if the child does a lot of exercise, the muscles get strong, making the bone very strong.

So, a baby born in space is going to have pretty strange and weak bones in most parts of their body. This shouldn't affect them too much if they spend their whole life in space, but they will be in a lot of trouble if they come back to Earth. Their leg and feet bones will be too weak to hold them, the spine will probably crush under its own weight. The heart muscle will not be strong enough to pump blood around the whole body because of gravity pulling the blood down, and leg muscles will be too weak for you to stand. Basically, your bones and muscles will be much too heavy to support, and you will fall down in a big heap and die - (unless the mother is very insistent and special equipment is made so the baby can exercise muscles and bones to make them similar to the ones on Earth -but you still have heart and other things...).



and back to our story,the root to the problem could be corrected if the mother get enough folate supplement during her pregnancy which only cost RM1..20 per strip...Simple as abc..but illiteracy and poverty toll the girls life..Yet ,there was a good thing from all of this..There was a sir and madam that did the surgery for free for that girl and taking care of the baby so well till someone is willing to adopt her..Maybe God took shit our of the baby to give something better..

by Lakdhes


Ref:
 http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/people/jour...
conception and fertility in space: 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/...
http://weboflife.nasa.gov/currentRese...

http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genu_varum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spina_bifida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus