One useful comment

[WarpGirl]

Oh Asso my dear, if you really knew my life, you could never even think that in relation to me. I know drs. better than drs. know themselves. They've saved my live 1000's of times, and nearly killed me 10,000 times more.

[Silverbullet]

WG, you know the saying "Doctors bury their mistakes" My right eye is shot because of a Doctor's mistake. I can remember a report of a Doctor in florida who amputated the wrong leg. Took off the good leg and left the one to be amputated on. The man lost both legs due to error. It happens. Their are honest errors and stupidity. That occurs in all professions. Doctors are not immune to it. We count on Doctors. Unfortunately, TV has raised unrealistic expectations in some. I have had some great Doctors in the past and honor them. I can only remember one who I thought was not as good a Doctor as he should have been. but then I am not medicaly trained so I was probably wrong in that judgement.

SB

[WarpGirl]

I didn't say it was stupidity or mistakes...

[Distracted]

Yup. There's nothing magical about the MD degree. We're people. We make mistakes just like everyone else. And then we get sued.

Some docs forget that they're fallible, though. Especially surgeons. There's something about the job description that requires a person to have an over-inflated opinion of him/herself and what he or she is capable of doing. Of course, without the surgeon's mentality the first heart, liver, lung, and kidney transplants would never have taken place, so there's something to be said for the benefits of a god complex.

[Distracted]

When you mention Trip's body rejecting foreign material that brings to mind the episode where Trip is impregnated by Ah'Len. Trip's body would have attacked, destroyyed or ejected the empryonic material she transfered to him as it was a forgin origin. Not his DNA It would fight it. Yet in the episode that did not happen. Phlox did nothing to prevent rthe rejection. that is one of the things about that episode that bothered me. Otherwise I liked the Episode very much as it was the first indication that T'Pol would get jealous of Trip having anything to do with another female.

Ah, but pregnancy and organ donation are two completely different conditions. In a human pregnancy the blood supplies of the mother and the fetus are separated by the placenta. The only things that cross over are smaller protein molecules (like certain antibodies), oxygen, individual amino acids and other nutrients. No cells cross over, so rejection isn't possible, since rejection is a function of cellular immunity. Think about it. If that weren't the case then every pregnant woman would reject her own fetus, since human fetuses are by design not identical to their mothers. Very rarely some women experience recurrent early miscarriage because they carry antibodies to fetal tissue, and occasionally babies are born with a condition called "Hydrops fetalis" which is caused by antibodies the mother makes to fetal blood cells (they don't live long), but normally the woman's immune system is suppressed during pregnancy to even further decrease the chance that she will develop antibodies that might harm the baby. That's why pregnant women are so much more likely to die of viral illnesses like flu and chickenpox.

Admittedly, I have no idea how the pregnancy worked with Trip, since normally the placenta is composed of tissues originating from the lining of the mother's uterus on one side and tissues originating from the fetus on the other, and Trip, of course, has no uterus on his ribcage, but I suppose we'll just have to suspend disbelief with that one. Just like I really had to scratch my head over the nipples on his wrists, of all places. What about the perfectly good nipples on his chest, for pete's sake? I guess it would have been too shocking for prime time TV for Trip to start growing breasts where breasts are supposed to be.

[WarpGirl]

Two words, wardrobe malfunction they edited the scene in Harbinger because of it. And Dis that was awesome. But you know there's this show on discovery health about weird pregnacies, and sometimes the baby grows outside the womb. But Unexpected couldn't sell me on the idea of a human man getting knocked up. Somethings are just too imopssible, even for sci-fi.

[Distracted]

It's actually theoretically possible, but it would probably kill the man who bore the child. Abdominal pregnancies have gone to term. That's when the fertilized ovum somehow gets into the abdominal cavity and the placenta attaches to one of the abdominal organs instead of the inside of the uterus. The woman almost always dies afterwards because the placenta can't separate from the organ it implanted on and she either hemorrhages to death or dies of sepsis once the placenta decays inside of her. There's been only one case that I know of of a term abdominal pregnancy that didn't kill the mother. There was this 70 or 80 year old woman in South America who'd had a "tumor" in her belly for years and it turned out to be the mummified body of a term abdominal pregnancy. She lived in the mountains of Peru or something. She apparently had excruciating abdominal pain for years but was still alive at 70 for them to xray her and find a full term baby's skeleton in there. Creepy, huh? Anyway, if that's possible I suppose you could deliberately transplant an embryo into the inside of a man's abdomen and hope it attached to something. Then you'd have to hope the organ it attached to had enough blood supply to support the child's development AND cross your fingers that you'd be able to get both baby and placenta out of the guy's abdomen without killing him. The man would need to want to bear a child more than he valued his own life, because the odds would be very good that neither he nor the child would live, but it's POSSIBLE. Theoretically.

[WarpGirl]

If I have a nightmare tonight it's your fault! Wait, hysterectomy at 20... That can't happen to me right? They didn't take EVERYTHING!

[Distracted]

Nope. Not possible. No need to lose any sleep. Hysterectomy shuts the door. Nothing can get into the abdomen afterwards.

You do know they made a movie about male pregnancy, don't you? Arnold Schwartzeneggar played the pregnant guy. It was disturbing.

[WarpGirl]

I can't even watch the preview! Thanks for the reassurence. Although tomorrow I will hate that I can't get pregnant again.

[enterprikayak]

full term baby's skeleton in there. Creepy, huh?

[Distracted]

Actually, I did some research and both baby and mother living after a full term abdominal pregnancy isn't as uncommon as I thought it was. This is an old article from 1985 and the MRI images suck, but apparently both of them lived here. More of them living, now that we have better prenatal care and virtually everyone gets an ultrasound, makes sense. http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/reprint/145/2/407.pdf

So...back to our original discussion. I've never read any fanfic that made a serious attempt to explain exactly how sticking his hands into a bowl of shiny rocks got Trip pregnant. I've avoided the subject altogether in my fics because I had NO clue how to make it even remotely believable. Now that I'm revisiting the idea and really thinking hard...

Nope. Nothing.

Okay. Wait. So...maybe the pebbles in the bowl are made of nanites, right? And a second AFTER what we saw onscreen, all of the pebbles just dissolved into this system of microfiber tubules that INFILTRATE both Ahlen's and Trip's circulatory systems, connecting them.

Why would nanites do this? Because they're NANITES, people. They DO weird shit. With me so far?

And maybe the nanites also secrete this hallucinogen that keeps both of them sedated and happy while all of this is happening, so neither of them have any clue that they're, like, connected. And then a fertilized embryo from Ahlen (who would have to be born pregnant or be capable of parthenogenesis to be able to do this without any genetic input from Trip, but we're not looking for loopholes) gets transported through the tubules into Trip's circulation. Since it's his arm that's connected, the embryo ends up deposited into a blood vessel on his chest wall before it sticks and implants. The tubules divide and separate, and most of the nanites end up back in the bowl being shiny pebbles again, but some of the nanites stay in Trip for a while and make chemicals that encourage Trip's body cells to differentiate into the "maternal" side of the placenta before the nanites die off, and by the time Phlox realizes that Trip is pregnant there aren't any nanites to detect.

Taaa Daaaa!

Why nanites? I dunno. Why does reversing the polarity of everything and adding a dash of tachyon particles always work to get any ST ship out of a tight spot? The universe will never know.

[WarpGirl]

And that is why, she is one of the "Brilliant people" here, and the rest of use are teeny mortals just basking in the glow of her magnificence. All Hail Dis! Now write the fic lady!

[Distracted]

*snort* I'll pass. Anybody who wants it can have it.

Psst. You probably want to tone down the worship, Warpgirl, otherwise I'll get a swelled head. And you wouldn't want that. It's not a pretty sight, with my head not fitting through doorways and all.

[WarpGirl]

Hmmm. Nah! Might be amusing. Dis I can't do squat with nanites!