The ever exciting med school flag football season has started up at my school, and after some crazy team-trading drama, we had our first game today. Predictably, I quickly hurt myself by jamming my thumb into someone's hip while reaching for a flag. Jamming is a technical term...
Later in the game as our artificially high score passed 100, I turned to a teammate and, while still rubbing my sore thumb, exclaimed, "Wow, I think we just broke three digits!"
I immediately knew I should have phrased that differently when he looked with a shocked expression down at my hand. Only at a med school flag football game, would he think I was casually commenting on breaking three fingers.
TIL: Red blood cells actually participate in the body's immune response via the complement system. Though they have no nucleus and are generally pretty useless, red blood cells express complement receptors which can bind to antigen fragments and bring them to the liver or spleen, where they are taken up by macrophages for incorporation into the adaptive immune response.
Of course, red blood cells also cause the immune system some problems too; they do not have the ability that most other cells do that tells the immune system they are infected. It's like a bank without a silent alarm and malaria is the crook that has cased the joint. Once inside, malaria is invisible to the immune police. The silent alarm in this case is major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II, which displays pieces of an infectious agent, alerting the immune system to the infection (and begging for a mercy killing).
Also, it is loosely estimated that there is a 1% decrease in renal function per year after the age of 25. Woohoo, still 98% functioning!
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