So when you are a baby, before you come out, your belly button is where your main blood vessels go from the placenta of your mother and they carry oxygen and nutrients through the belly button into the foetus. So their lungs aren’t functional yet, so they’re not breathing, they’re just surrounded by fluid.
In order to get oxygen and sugar and everything from the placenta and from the mother, the blood vessels run through where your belly button is. When you are born, you can breathe and you can take things orally. So you don’t need the belly button to do this anymore. So the belly button, where the umbilical cord is, that’s clamped off and cut when you are born. Those blood vessels are still there, but then they sort of shrink away because you don’t need them. The umbilical sort of stalk falls off this little remnant after the cord’s cut and you’re left with this little usually inner or outy.
But because of where those blood vessels used to be and where they go away, that is the quickest point of access into the abdomen because that was where things went into your tummy. So when we use it for keyhole surgery, we know that the little stalk connects to the sort of muscles and the layers of the abdominal wall.
So it’s the point where everything else is usually out of the way and it’s the easiest point to get into the tummy. People can get little hernias through the belly button because there was a weakness there, they’re sort of closed up. So babies can have those when they’re born. It’s normal to have those when you’re born and normally they go away and by the time you’re about two or three, but sometimes they don’t go away. And then we have to fix them, which is fun. But that’s what we use it for – it’s a physiological use up until you’re born and then we use it as a bit of a bit of a cheat to get into the tummy.
