Travels of a Carbon Atom

Part 1: Digestion

"Carli, wake up!"

A shrill voice pounds on my eardrums. Well, if I had eardrums I assume it would. I jolt awake. Not again! I partied too hard last night and now I'm super hungover inside another stupid starch molecule. I knew there was something weird about that oxygen I bonded with. Now here she is, right next to me. If my mother could see me right now, she'd be shaking her head.

I turn to Oxxi (seriously, who spells it like that?) and shoot her an angry look.

"Where the hell are we?" I demand.

"I think we're in a potato chip or something. Lays BBQ, from the looks of those lipids." She shrugs and goes back to humming some annoying Oxy-Rock.

I can't believe it. Here we go again. Another cycle through some organism's system, another week wasted. I hate it here. I miss the good old days, before the paleozoic era. Now everything moves so fast.

Speaking of fast, I hear the bag we're in being opened and our chip being lifted into some human's mouth. UGHH!!! Now we're being chewed by some not-so-pearly whites. Chomp chomp chomp. Those annoying salivary glands make us all wet and slimy. Ew! Before I know what's happening, a salivary amylase comes colliding towards our starch molecule!!! It seizes us and lodges us into its active site. "NOOOOO!!!!" I scream as I'm hydrolysed. Bruised and battered, I exit the active site. Many of my previous neighbors are gone. But WAIT, Oxxi is still right next to me? What the hell? Now we're part of a disaccharide, a lowly maltose. Oxxi laughs at me. Could this day get any worse?

Turns out that jinxed it. This human's gross tongue forms us into a bolus and pushes us to the pharynx! We are swallowed and before you can say "maltose" we're at the upper esophageal sphincter. Our maltose is towards the outside of the bolus and I graze the epiglottis. Ugh. We begin to be pushed down the esophagus with some unpleasant peristalsis. Gross! A little bit of mechanical digestion is happening, but luckily not much. We reach the lower esophageal sphincter. Here comes the worst part.

I HATE being in the stomach! We fall into the gastric juice and the walls of the stomach start contracting. We're being churned. These hydrogen chloride bitches denature the molecules around us. Soon we're all chyme- UGH!!! I roll my eyes at the atoms in the proteins screaming as they get turned into polypeptides by the pepsin enzymes. Cry babies. Man, I wanna give this human a gastric ulcer! Can we get some urease in the house?I have to sit here for another 3 hours- I could use some entertainment! I'm still a carbon atom in a maltose molecule, but as we're pushed out by the pyloric sphincter I know it won't be that way for long.

We're pushed into the duodenum. Immediately, we're surrounded by intestinal juice- UGH!! The intestinal juice has some maltase that surrounds us with its active site. In a painful synthesis, I and a few of my neighbors are sent out, now a glucose molecule. YESSS!!! Oxxi got put into the other glucose molecule! Finally! Ok, my day is a little better.

We leave the duodenum as a glucose monomer. Oh well, at least all of digestion is over. Now it's time for stupid absorption. This is gonna take a while. We enter the jejunum. We brush up against a villi and then a microvilli. Then, a surface epithelial cell grabs us- rude! I'm now a carbon atom part of a glucose molecule in the lumen of the small intestine, watching the villi grab more of us. There are capillaries underneath us. Soon, I'll be a carbon atom in the circulatory system. *Sigh* This is what they call digestion blues.