Navels, belly buttons, innies or outies … whatever term you utilize, your umbilicus could have plenty to inform you concerning the state of your health.
For some, they’re the thing of nightmares – omphalophobia (the fear of belly buttons) is an actual condition. For others, they’re a fashion accessory to be shown off in a crop top, or decorated with a body piercing.
Whatever your feelings about belly buttons, one thing’s of course – it once joined you to your mother. The umbilical cord is severed at birth to go away only a small clamped stump that progressively withers and falls away per week or two later.
What you’re left with, normally, is a small wrinkled depression. That’s if you have got an “innie”, as most of us – 90% apparently – do. From this point, the belly button seems to turn out to be redundant – apart from to assemble dust and fluff.
But that’s not the entire story – your navel has more depth to it than simply a number of millimetres.
The umbilicus is an access point for the vessels carrying blood to and from the foetus. These have come from the placenta and run through the umbilical cordcoated in Wharton’s jelly – a gelatinous connective tissue contained within the cord that insulates and protects them.
There are normally three vessels inside the cord. The one carrying oxygen and nutrients to the foetus is the umbilical vein. It passes through the umbilicus and feeds into the developing foetal circulation. There are also two umbilical arteriesthough these carry deoxygenated blood and waste products, flowing in the opposite direction back to the placenta.
This circulation will not be needed after the newborn is born, and once disconnected from the placenta the umbilical vessels naturally close up. But the little stump of cut cord left clinging on can still be of use for a short while, especially in newborn babies who’re poorly. The vessels can have drip lines inserted and be used for infusions of drugs, or have blood samples taken from them for testing.
The umbilicus is a portal within the wall of the abdomen – it’s a little-known undeniable fact that during your embryonic development your intestines actually should leave your abdominal cavity due to limited space, but return a number of weeks later. They achieve this via the umbilicus, passing into the cord.
As a result the umbilicus will not be just an access point, but some extent of weakness. An umbilical hernia occurs if a piece of intestine pokes through any gap. This may require an operation to correct it.
The nun and the navel
Poor Sister Mary Joseph Dempsey. She was a nun who devoted much of her life to the care of patients in a hospital in Minnesota. She trained as a nurse, later becoming a surgical assistant to the doctor William Mayo. It was during this tenure that she highlighted an interesting commentary.
At the time (the late nineteenth century), cancers of the abdomen and pelvis were typically diagnosed much later, and unfortunately were often more extensive. We call this process metastasiswhere a cancer starts in a single organ or location, then spreads to a different.
Mary Joseph noted that some patients with metastatic cancer had a brand new palpable swelling or nodule of their umbilicus. She did the noble deed of reporting this to Mayo, who fairly evidently hadn’t noted it himself. He went on to quite ignominiously publish these findings under his own name, without giving due credit to his esteemed colleague. It was only after the deaths of Dempsey and Mayo – each in 1939 – that one other doctor, Hamilton Bailey, rightly named the finding Sister Mary Joseph’s nodule.
The nodule is firm, of variable colouring, and really arises from spread of the cancer to the umbilical tissue. It’s not seen as commonly nowadays, since more cancers at the moment are diagnosed earlier before extensive spreading occurs.
Medusa’s head
Other signs might be observed within the navel which have a footing in mythology. One example allows us to attract a connection between the liver and the umbilicus.
The skin across the navel has beds of superficial veins that feed back towards the deeper circulation. They actually drain blood into the hepatic portal vein, a big vessel that’s heading into the liver, chock-full of nutrients absorbed from the gut.
If the pressure within the portal vein becomes too high (mostly in consequence of liver diseases, like alcohol cirrhosis) pressure builds within the connecting vessels too. Veins have thinner partitions than arteries and are likely to balloon under pressure.
As a result, the normally small veins across the navel dilate in size and turn out to be visible beneath the skin, fanning in all directions. This sign, like a head replete with snakes for hair, is known as the pinnacle of Medusaor Medusa’s head. In Greek mythology, the gorgon Medusa whose head was severed by the hero Perseus, had the flexibility to show anyone who beheld her gaze to stone.
And on that topic, all that dirt, debris and dead skin in our navels also needs to get an honourable (or perhaps dishonourable) mention – prolonged accumulation of this material inside the cavity could make it harden over time, forming a stony mass. We call this an omphalolithor umbilical stone.
So, the umbilicus is something of a reliable crystal ball in diagnosing internal illnesses. But as as to whether you regard it as a pretty a part of your individual anatomy, one has to ask the query: are you innie or outie?
