Professional Critic: What Else Can You Get Out of There?

Reader, remember our last anatomy lesson? I thought I needed a refresher when I read this headline: Charitable Aunt Has Kidney Removed Through Her Vagina. My qualifications to understand this are both academic and intuitive but between taking a women's biology class in college and being the lifelong owner of a vagina, I still couldn't picture how this was physically possible.

I still didn't understand it when I read the source article so I had to Google "transvaginal transplantation." Finally, one site spelled it out for the curious, the literal, and the Professional Critic: after detaching the kidney, the surgeon makes an incision in the back of the vagina, then passes the kidney through the incision into the vagina, then out to the waiting world. And to keep everything nice 'n tidy, the detached kidney is put in a plastic bag with an attached string so it can be pulled out like a tampon. Genius! Take note, reader: the wave of the future is "natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery."

Through this minimally invasive procedure, the list of items we can extract from our body holes is limited only by our imaginations: