What is this woman holding?

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A tube worm from the bottom of the mid-ocean vents? Some Dr.-Seuss-inspired bagpipes?

Silly! It’s a giant, fiberglass model of the ileocecal junction (part of the human gut where the ilium joins the colon) in a person with Crohn’s disease. What else would it be?

The colon is the creation of Raleigh, N.C., resident Andrea Stevenson Won, who designed it not for kicks, but as a commission for a display at a medical meeting. Just goes to show: There are more ways to make a living in medicine than I knew of.

Trained as a commercial sculptor, Won got tired of fashioning toys. In her new life, she’s done anatomical restorations for patients: helped make a partial foot while interning at the Duke University Anaplastology Clinic, made fingers and faces, just finished a pair of ears. She’s crafted little model hearts and done digital face reconstructions for museum exhibits.

And then there is her latest project: A huge model of the cartilage of the nose. The cartilages are normally about an inch -- the ones in Won’s model are two feet long.

Who, you ask, could possibly want one of those? The buyer is a rhinoplasty surgeon. With those nice big cartilages he can show people very clearly where he makes his cuts.

Hmm. How tempting: to quit the office grind for a glamorous life fashioning humongous body parts --hearts! livers! stomachs! spleens! ‘There’s money to be made in making giant colons, but it’s a tiny field,’ Won cautions. And then there’s the tanking economy: ‘Many people might consider a giant heart to be a luxury item.’

Oh well. Back to the trenches.

--Rosie Mestel