To exercise my creative mind and to help increase activity in this part of the forums, I'm going to ask an open-ended question or give you guys an open-ended situation every day in the hopes that some of you will come up with answers! =)
Kudos to Ernie for this thread idea, and also for giving me the first question...
What would you do if you woke up one morning and it was 1901?
You find yourself at a packed sports stadium, and you have lost your parents. Only thing is..you forgot how to speak, and you have no knowledge on how to do sign language. What do you do?
1. I don't go to sports stadiums with my parents. 2. I always have a pen and notepad ready with me. 3. I write out my distress to somebody and they help me call for my parents.
I'll send them a text message. If you read most text messages without prior knowledge on the people sending them, you would infer that nobody knows how to speak anyway.
You find yourself at a packed sports stadium, and you have lost your parents.
I probably wandered away from them on purpose. Either way, they'll find me eventually. They always do.
I'll post a new situation since nobody else has for the past month.
One morning, you wake up, and you have no skin. It doesn't hurt, surprisingly, as long as you don't put any sort of pressure on your body at all (as in, use your hands or attempt to sit down), but all of your blood vessels and muscles are suddenly exposed, so you're not well protected from the outside world. Conveniently enough, nobody else is home and they won't be for at least another few days, so you'll have to figure this one out on your own. What do you do?
Unless you can fly, wouldn't you always be applying some sort of pressure to your body?
Regardless, I'd probably call 911. I'd enjoy a sheltered drive in an ambulance followed by a full-body skin-graph (I think that's what they're called).
wouldn't you always be applying some sort of pressure to your body?
You'd have to suffer through the pressure put on your feet while standing up, but that would probably be more bearable than, say, lying down in a stretcher for who knows how long.
Considering how much skin you'd need to graft onto the body, it would most likely have to be a prosthetic graft. Autologous (skin from your body) would obviously not be possible, and isogeneic would only be possible if you had an identical twin. So that leaves allogeneic (skin from another human) and xenogeneic (skin from another species), provided that you can acquire enough skin from human and/or animal donors to cover your entire body; and prosthetic, which is skin being replaced by synthetic materials.
Look at me, pretending to know what I'm talking about. Wikipedia, you never fail me.
So the question becomes, if you are to have skin grafted to your body (and I don't know if this is even possible if you don't have any skin to begin with), which type of graft would you ultimately choose? Every way would be ultimately very expensive and painful, and you would look like Frankenstein's monster or some ratty old doll with stitches all over your body.
@Salvidian how do you press the number to call 911 if he says applying pressure to your hand hurts? also if your blood vessels and muscle tissues are exposed to the air why don't you suffer from infection or inflammation? remember, skin primary function is to protect your body from the so - called intergumentary hazard ( microbes, radiation, excessive heat or chilling, etc). even if you don't die in one day because of massive infection, assuming the room is sterile, your only option is to shout for help ( if that doesn't hurt either ), which is not very effective.
Also, my opinion ( just an opinion, correct me if i'm wrong ) is that if you have no skin then your spinal cord ( on your back ) would get squished and you get instant paralysis. so the situation is can't be solved at all
You'd have to suffer through the pressure put on your feet while standing up, but that would probably be more bearable than, say, lying down in a stretcher for who knows how long.
Debatable. Standing, you would be focusing all the pressure onto one location. Also, look at how relatively thick the skin on the soles of your feet is compared to the rest of your body. Without that protection, standing might just cause your feet to... squish apart....
...gross...
First I would call 911. Then, I would wrap myself in sterile gauze, to the best of my abilities. I do keep some in the house, but seeing as I probs don't have enough to go full on mummy I would focus on areas most likely to... squish... (still gross)
I would probably die in the hospital. If not, I would try to get some new skin. Maybe a nice tiger pelt. Perhaps chinchilla, for that nice cozy feeling.
