reason # 449584794 to stay away from alcohol

Everyone knows that drinking alcohol can screw up your liver. But alcohol isn't snooty. It will hang out with any old organ that is willing to welcome it into its tissues, providing an amusement park of sorts for your favorite wine, beer, whiskey. We all know that the pancreas makes insulin and secretes stuff that helps us digest our food. Pretty important functions, right? Well, give your pancreas a little loving energy, because this is what can happen to it if you booze too much.

Acute pancreatitis. In this disease, the pancreas DIGESTS ITSELF with its own enzymes. Like cannibalism without all the glamor. Here, marooned in a sea of beer, the pancreas has no other choice but to eat itself. Alcohol doesn't deserve all the credit for pancreatitis though, because gall stones can cause it too.

So how do you know you've got it? You will feel abdominal pain, in the epigastric area. Where is the epigastric area? Basically, the space below where your ribs come together. This pain is also felt in the back though. Nausea is also common. If you tell your doctor you are having these symptoms, what else will she look for? She'll check out your serum lipase levels. Lipase is a pancreatic enzyme that breaks down fat. Its serum level is not supposed to be high (why would enzymes to break down fat be at high levels in your blood?), so if it is = pancreas is messed up.

This is some serious serious stuff. You can get blood clots, bleeding, respiratory distress, infection, and organ failure from acute pancreatitis. So it's clearly no joke.

take home - don't drink and digest. If you do, you might lose that whole digesting thing.

Day 14 progresses. I am moving on to the sunny slopes of endocrine land, to study Cushing's and Addison's (what JFK had, and what made him so tan, which helped him win the presidency in 1960 over Nixon).