Scale Super Pile

How much of your body can you have amputated or removed and still survive?

I figure you could lose your arms and legs, no problem but if you lost a kidney and a lung as well, would you shuffle off the mortal coil? How about a percentage of your skin. Or your ears and nose? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fruit-loop-super-psycho ‘break into your house to watch you sleep’ kind of person. I’m just bored, it’s saturday and this question popped into my head. I mean, if you sat on a giant balance scale and you sat on one side and piled your organs and limbs on the other, would you balance or even tip the scale. Hmmm. Answers from doctors would be gratefully recieved but I’ll be happy to hear from anyone with a spare ten minutes and a semi-sadistic imagination!

In theory, I suppose you could live with

1. Your brain
2. Your heart
3. 1 lung
4. 1 kidney
5. Your liver
6. Some of your glands (not sure which one you absolutely need, probably the pancreas and pineal for sure)
7. Some blood vessels and cappilaries to connect everything
8. Enough of your spinal cord to connect everything.

You could go without skin I suppose, but you’d have to be in a clean environment, like the bubble boy. In that state, let’s hope you didn’t have any nerves, because every temperature change or slight breeze would cause you some nasty pain. Not to mention you’d dehydrate very easily. Of your head, all you really need is your brain, but you’ll need at least a sac or part of your skull or something to hold it. It needs some fluid around it. Probably goes for your other organs too. If you’re not moving around (and if this is how things are, you are NOT moving around), you probably don’t even need your ribs.

You’re going to need a nutrient tube or something to keep you alive, and probably a machine to breath for you too. For the feeding tube, at least a stomach might be necessary, but I’m not sure about that. I don’t know if it’s possible to feed nutrients directly into the blood stream.

You’d be deaf, blind, mute, and unable to feel, taste, or smell, but you could maintain a very precarious existence.

If you don’t want machines or plastic bubbles keeping you alive, I’m afraid you’re going to need most of your head and torso. All of your limbs, hair, eyes, ears, nose, lips, nipples, etc, can all be removed though. Removing large amounts of skin leaves you incredibly vulnerable to infection, so you’ll probably end up keeping that. But you can still lose some organs! You probably don’t need all your glands or remaining bones, and in addition you can drop a kidney, a lung, your spleen, your appendix, at least half your stomach, a large portion of your intestines, your testes or pretty much all your female reproductive organs, depending on your sex, and any excess fat or connective tissue not holding anything necessary in place. Sorry, guys need a penis to excrete waste, so we have to keep it if we are staying away from devices to keep us alive. This would still be a pretty precarious life, and not a lot of fun to be, or be around. You wouldn’t be very healthy at all, and probably wouldn’t live very long.

So if you got on a scale and tossed body parts to the other side until you were at absolute limit before you couldn’t take away any more and still be alive, I’d say the scale would certainly tip towards the pieces you removed. Your limbs alone would go a long way toward doing that.