My Oddball Body

I have finally found after all these years what I believe is my calling.
It all came about suddenly one afternoon during my weekly session at the physical therapist to relieve persistent pain in my right knee. The therapist asked if I would give her permission to take a picture of my body for a human physiology class she was teaching at a local college.

She wanted to show her students what would maybe amaze them: the fact I lacked a pectoral muscle in my right chest, a condition called Poland Syndrome. That made me question whether an entire population of a European country is deficient in pectoral muscles.

Turns out my syndrome is named for the 19th century British surgeon who first described this deformity, Sir Alfred Poland, so you can desist with the Polish jokes. Turns out Sir Alfred first described the situation in his 1841 paper called “Deficiency of the Pectoral Muscles” in the body of George Elt, a deceased convicted convict. Other than Mr. Elt and I having the same condition, we apparently have very little else in common. To date, far as I know, I’m neither convicted nor deceased.

Lacking this major chest muscle made me almost physically incapable of lifting weights over 10 pounds with my right arm. It also made me appear rather lopsided like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

A doctor recently told me that lacking a pectoral muscle is a freak of nature. I was perhaps a one-in-10,000-20,000-or-more occurrence. That is why for so long until I learned that I was such a rare specimen that I was tilting at windmills, so to speak.

How I ended up being so unique remains shrouded in mystery. My mother speculated that I might have had polio as an infant, which caused a malformation. Or I was just born without a pectoral muscle and nobody noticed the missing link until I was older. I guess by then it was too late for a pectoral transplant if such a thing even existed.

Luckily, I’m left-handed, maybe because I lack a right pectoral muscle. I never heard, at least in my presence, of anyone shrieking in horror at the unholy sight of where a muscle had taken a leave of absence. The same applies to my dating life, where no upstanding women who I told about my chest ever asked me to take off my shirt so she could see whether or not I was just trying to impress her with how unusual I was.

The physical therapist had me stand against the wall bare-breasted. This made me wonder if my spine was also out of joint. It felt like I was in a police lineup for criminals or undergoing a drunk driving test as she snapped photos of me in different positions–facing the camera, to the left and right sides, and face-first up against the wall–for I guess a 3- or 4-dimensional view of how my body was misshaped.

I never knew until that day with the therapist that I would be the subject of such fascination, captivation, or trepidation. On the bright side, my body might be used for advancing science.

The therapist wondered when she showed the pictures to her class how her students would react to seeing my strange chest. Or would they even notice the discrepancy that maybe I was descended from a flat-chested society of apes in prehistoric times and that as men and women developed (literally) over time most of us started being equipped with pectoral muscles.

Now that I’ve donated my body for the betterment of humanity, I see even more possibilities of where this could lead.

All these years I’ve worked in jobs which never showcased my raw attributes can now be put to better use as my chest is the subject of a photo spread in either a mass circulation magazine such as National Geographic, Scientific American, or even Playboy or Playgirl. I don’t care where I appear as long as the price is right. Let the bidding begin now for my one-in-a gazillion-body.
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Eric Green is a notorious humor writer, with many of his pieces published in humor magazines, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.