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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Just a tangential anecdote offered on a fine Friday night. I’ll be sure to check the rules of this subreddit more closely in the future.

I enjoyed it.

Concurred.

I mean, hardly anyone disputes the usefulness of moderation. I think these sorts of anecdotes lower the quality of the discussion, and HNers should take that into consideration.

cool story bro, unironically.

At least it was related to the decision to remove a spleen or not. In at least one case I now know of, in a young patient they decided to keep the spleen.

In some cases hearing of unextraordinary events helps to calibrate what extraordinary is. I have never suffered a spleen injury, but have heard of lots of young men having theirs removed when I was younger. This anecdote leads me to believe those may have been extraordinary cases. At the very least I no longer think doctors routinely just remove spleens as I once did.

Mine was lost due to rupture in a motorcycle accident. The doctors didn't say whether keeping it was an option, but I doubt it: it came with a bunch of broken ribs and two punctured/collapsed lungs, so my body had more than a few things to deal with, and fixing a spleen was probably low on the list.

Any issues as a result of being spleenless?

None that I'm aware of. I'm pretty cautious disease-wise, and I've managed not to catch anything serious since.

Spleens are one of the more vulnerable organs. They're prone to rupture during trauma, and if ruptured, can easily cause a person to bleed out. In many motorcyclist accidents, a ruptured spleen can be the cause of death.

Spleens are essentially large bags of blood and immunological pulp, and the reason they evolved this way is because they act as a filter against bloodborne pathogens. They host a diverse but specialized collection of immune cells, such as macrophages, and have a truly unique and interesting role in overall health.

You should read up on the thymus next. That one is super important and is also implicated in aging.

> You should read up on the thymus next. That one is super important and is also implicated in aging.

That one seems to self-deactivate with age.

Indeed. The thymus is responsible for much of our immune cell production, but it shrivels away to nothing by our elderly years.

It's unfortunate, because our responses to immune challenges - including cancer - diminish with age.

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