![\"liver](\"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/liver-dinner.jpg\")
<\/a>assertive deep rich brown color, the kind of brown that royalty wears, or the color of the most beautiful horse you could ever imagine.\u00a0 The liver certainly didn\u2019t have any unpleasant associations \u2013 it wasn\u2019t pale or timidly brown, or the color of mud or dirt.\u00a0 And then the liver was always served with a beautiful rich saffron-colored squash, again the color of royalty.\u00a0 I remember dipping the bite of liver into the pureed squash and marveling at the exquisite color combination as the saffron draped over the deep brown.\u00a0 I hoped that my last name of Brown was the same color as a liver.<\/p>\nI don\u2019t think I knew exactly what liver was, and certainly didn\u2019t realize that I myself was the proud owner of a liver.\u00a0 My attempts to come to grips with being a carnivore didn’t include liver and only focused on muscles as meat.\u00a0 Standard issue hamburgers were far removed from the barnyard cows but eating chicken could be unsettling.\u00a0 Chicken breasts were generically referred to as \u201cwhite meat,\u201d thus removing any direct anatomic association, but chicken legs were a different story.\u00a0 They actually looked like legs, and you could imagine them still attached to a vibrant chicken, proudly strutting around the chicken yard.\u00a0 And then there was the Easter lamb, not the meat itself, but the very anatomically correct cake my grandmother served.\u00a0 As much as everyone liked cake, it was Then came the cadaver in my first year of medical school.\u00a0 With the body splayed open and each muscle carefully dissected, I had to confront the stark fact that I was a carnivore.\u00a0 I remember teasing out the nerve and artery that ran beneath the bottom edge of ribs, and then that night at dinner I found the exact same anatomy on my barbecued pork ribs.\u00a0 I\u2019m always going to be a carnivore since I don\u2019t think that I could ever give up my bacon, but it is easy to divorce yourself from the animal kingdom when the meat is butchered and carefully wrapped up.\u00a0 It is more difficult when you realize that you are personally carrying around the same cuts of meat.<\/p>\n And then there was the liver.\u00a0 My cadaver liver, frankly, was a bi dinged up and shrunken with formaldehyde, but then I became better reacquainted with my favorite childhood meal when I started doing autopsies as part of my pathology residency.\u00a0 A fresh human It turns out the all vertebrates have a liver, and it is the largest solid organ in the body, larger even than the brain.\u00a0 Its shape is determined by the constraints of anatomy.\u00a0 The liver of the snake, for example, is long and thin, but the human liver consists of two big honking lobes nestled under the ribs on the right.\u00a0 And the liver is a total workhorse.\u00a0 I am reminded of the character Boxer in George Orwell\u2019s allegory Animal Farm.\u00a0 Boxer is a loyal horse, representing the hard working proletariat in revolutionary Russia.\u00a0 He takes on any job at the Animal Farm and his mantra is, \u201cI will work harder.\u201d This is the epitome of the liver.<\/p>\n Sure the heart is a vital organ, but it only does one thing, beat (and thank god for that). \u00a0If the heart falters, there are many drugs and devices that can whip it back into shape. \u00a0In contrast the functions of the liver go on forever and there are no drugs to improve liver function. \u00a0This vital organ sorts out the incoming nutrients delivered by the intestines, manufacturers vital proteins, manages the supply of glucose, produces bile that seeps into the intestine to aid in fat digestion, removes fatigued blood cells and detoxifies all sorts of drugs and nastiness that we throw at it.<\/p>\n Another great thing about the liver is that it can regrow whole new lobes.\u00a0 We are amazed by the lizard who can regrow a tail, complete with muscles, nerves and bone, but you can whack out half the liver and it will grow back and eagerly assume all its complicated responsibilities, good as new.\u00a0 What a fabulous spare part factory.\u00a0 If you are in the unfortunate situation of having a loved one who needs a new liver, or you have just suffered a gunshot wound or some other grisly trauma, you\u2019ve got enough liver to spare.<\/p>\n The loyal liver simply absorbs all the abuse that we heap on it.\u00a0 As the story of Animal Farm progresses, we see Boxer working harder and harder, but we also suspect that this unquestioning loyalty will eventually be his doom.\u00a0 When things start to go badly on Animal Farm, and the head pig Napoleon starts to execute other animals, Boxer can only naively say:<\/p>\n \u201cI would not have believed that such things could happen on our farm.\u00a0 It must be due \u00a0Though livers do have a weakness for viruses, it\u2019s hard to destroy a liver on your own. \u00a0You can douse it in toxins on a daily basis and it just keeps chugging along. \u00a0I even remember one microscopic slide from an IV drug user where I spotted small crystals of glass embedded in the liver cells. At the beginning of Animal Farm, Old Major gives Boxer some ominous advice about this unrequited loyalty:<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cThe very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, Jones will send you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the fox-hounds.\u201d<\/p>\n And that is exactly the fate of the liver, when exhaustion sets in and the liver finally fails, all you can do is cut it out and pray that you can quickly find a new one.<\/p>\n I have grown to love and respect my liver, and I am not the only one. \u00a0In his book, \u201cThe Lives of a Cell,\u201d the noted essayist and physician Lewis Thomas paid the following eloquent homage:<\/p>\n \u201cI’d sooner be told, forty thousand feet over Denver, that the 747 jet in which I had a coach seat was now mine to operate as I pleased; at least I would have the hope of bailing out, if I could find a parachute and discover quickly how to open a door. Nothing would save me and my liver, if I were in charge. For I am, to face the facts squarely, considerably less intelligent than my liver. I am, moreover,\u00a0constitutionally unable to make hepatic decisions, and I prefer not be obliged to, ever. I would not be able to think of the first thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n I would love to actually see my liver at work, glistening a deep rich brown in the upper right quadrant, pulsating slightly with the blood flow, and bobbing up and down with respiration. \u00a0I remember working in the pathology lab when I got a request to photograph a surgical specimen \u2013 an old, tired and lumpy uterus that had been removed in a hysterectomy.\u00a0 From time to time we would photograph specimens, but only if they posed some problem of orientation or were particularly interesting.\u00a0 This ho-hum uterus did not qualify so I ignored the request.\u00a0 And then the word came down from the OR; the surgeon insisted that I \u00a0photograph this thing since it belonged to a trustee\u2019s wife.\u00a0 I dutifully made the vanity shot, and imagined that the trustee\u2019s wife, who was evidently used to getting her way, must have had many children and had developed a sentimental attachment to her womb.\u00a0 And thinking of my liver, I understood. \u00a0When I had my gallbladder removed, I had enough wits about me to ask the surgeon to save the stones as a memento, but now I regret that I didn\u2019t give one of the OR nurses a camera and ask her to take a picture of my magnificent and loyal organ hard at work.<\/p>\n One meal stands out among all the childhood dinners I ever ate.<\/p>\n It\u2019s that shimmering ****** slithering across my plate.<\/p>\n I think of my own in my abdomen where it bobs and quivers.<\/p>\n And the deep respect I have for all hard working ******.<\/p>\n And the ****** lining is that we have enough liver to spare.<\/p>\n We can donate some because there\u2019s more than enough to share.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *’<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Answera:\u00a0 sliver, livers, silver<\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: My introduction to liver was perfectly pleasant.\u00a0 There was a period in my childhood when liver was a routine dinner entr\u00e9e.\u00a0 This was when my mother had 6 children under the age of 10 and was assisted by a mother\u2019s … Continue reading <\/a> difficult to get enthusiastic about diving in.\u00a0 What were you supposed to do, just chop off the lamb\u2019s head and let it roll around your plate?\u00a0 I remember an untouched Easter lamb cake languishing in my parent\u2019s freezer for many years.<\/p>\n<\/a>liver looks exactly<\/i> the same as the calf\u2019s liver in the meat department.\u00a0 And in that moment I realized that I could never ever eat liver again, not even if it was the last thing on earth.\u00a0 The specter of cannibalism was the major issue, but as I progressed through medical school, I grew to hold this humble organ in the highest esteem and felt it would be too disrespectful to eat one.<\/p>\n<\/a>to some fault in ourselves.\u00a0 The solution, as I see it, is to work harder.\u201d<\/p>\nThe missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.\u00a0 Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.\u00a0 Scroll down for answers.<\/em><\/h6>\n
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