The Heart is Always On The Left
Once in a while, patients turn up in the emergency room, and cause much confusion. One of them was a 22-year-old man from Nigeria, who had been suffering mysterious pain in the left side of his stomach for six years. If the pain had been located on the right side, doctors would immediately have treated him for appendicitis. X-rays made doctors realise that the positions of all his organs were inverted. His heart was located on the right side of his chest above the stomach, and his liver was located on the left. Not only was the man suffering from severe appendicitis, he was also diagnosed with situs inversus, that is very rare, and by which all internal organs are inverted. The condition is not dangerous, and many people possess some of the genes that could provide our children with inverted internal organs.