Well, well, well. Turns out my little brother's genetic superiority has been confirmed by an outside source. La-ti-da, broseph.
I would like to remind him, as well as the largely indifferent internet, that we are also the products of extensive and expensive dental and orthodontic intervention. We are not the golden children of a benevolent, cavity-free God, orbited by floss-bearing angels. I like to think of us more as the dental version of Wolverine from the X-Men-- fundamentally tampered with, painfully altered, and yet so much cooler for it.
Perhaps my little brother forgets, but there were times when our individual smiles produced winces in other people-- his when he was six years old and I had attempted on three separate occasions to knock out his two front teeth (perhaps my low success ratio can be accounted for by the profound genetic deficiencies in my eyesight, which were already manifesting themselves); mine for a good three years between grades 6 and 9 when instead of normal adult teeth, I instead grew the long, yellow burrowing teeth of a nutria from my upper gums.
But now... oh now. My teeth are pretty. Pants even says so. And functional-- did you know that my bite-ratio is in the 98th percentile? I too had a faith-affirming visit with a dentist after a criminally long hiatus, and as he poked and scraped at my gums he also praised my choice in undergraduate majors and my selection of a mate in the service. Imagine! I remember a time when Dr. Smith (our first dentist) sat next to me peering at my X-rays and just sighing over and over again, like I was the most hopelessly fucked up thing he'd ever seen. When someone with a tiny steel hook wedged between your molars finally approves of you, it's no wonder you felt you were meant to rule all mankind.
Just remember your roots, snaggletooth.
Showing posts with label medical details. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medical details. Show all posts
Monday, June 11, 2007
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
In search of a good, therapeutic cry
I'm having "heartache" again. I've been getting mysterious but annoying chest pain for roughly the past four years during times of stress, and it's so not worthy of a whole blog post, but I don't know how to make it go away so I figured I'd try writing.
The first time I got "heartache" was in 2004 about a week after Pants went off to Officer Candidate School. I was pulling long commutes to a very stressful (but good) job, and planning our wedding and simultaneous relocation only a few months away, and drinking extravagant amounts of coffee. My shoulders had risen to ear level and the muscles had hardened and clenched so much that patches of my scalp would go numb for long periods. I was getting headaches from grinding my teeth, and all my nails were chewed and picked down to raw, pink stumps.
In other words, I was a lovely calming presence who didn't at all need a firm shaking and a large martini.
One day at work, shortly after Hurricane Ivan had stomped all over Pants and his terrified, half-starved OCS classmates and destroyed our future hometown, I started having chest pains, like someone had walked up and socked me right in the sternum-- in fact, right in the manubrium, a term I inexplicably remember from high school anatomy.* Everything I'd ever heard about having chest pains indicated that it was Bad, so for once, I actually disengaged myself from the permanent ass grooves in my squeaky work chair and went to a minor emergency center.
(* Mrs. Jacobs, if you're out there, you gave me a C but you're my hero. You taught me so much medical Latin, and the day you came tip-toeing over in your squeaky shoes and told me that mine was the most delicately dissected rat brain you'd ever seen, and then plunked it into a bottle of preservative, I positively glowed.)
Minor emergency centers, in my experience, are usually leisurely places with large waiting rooms, like the broad, stagnant places in a stream where debris eddies, lingers, spins, and waits for an indeterminate time before finally catching the current and moving on again. Even if, say, you are suffering the acute misery of a urinary tract infection, you will linger and suffer with the rest of the lingering and suffering readers of old issues of Parenting magazine until someone remembers you in your purgatory and at last calls your name.
But not, as it turns out, if you're experiencing chest pains. Chest pains are the golden ticket that whisk you right through the double doors and in to see a chipper, young Asian doctor, who will palpate, thump, probe, and squeeze various parts of you while asking a dizzying variety of questions. As it turned out, every test came up fine until she asked me if perhaps I was under any stress at home or at work, to which I replied, "Not that I'm aware of," and then suddenly, to both our surprise, burst into hiccuping tears.
After I'd explained briefly about the situation with Pants, the wedding, and the move, she laughed and said "I think what you've got is heartache," and advised that I try to relax a little.
Hayao Miyazaki is a brilliant maker of animated Japanese children's movies-- Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle are two of my favorites-- and his approach to children's animation is refreshingly anti-Disney. For instance, none of his characters are either all good or all bad, and all are shown to be capable of change, in contrast to Disney films where the moral line is drawn with fierce and unrelenting certainty. Other themes in Miyazaki movies include the spiritual and emotional benefits of performing daily chores (I would have hated that as a kid, but as an adult I find it comforting, and am suddenly grateful for my parents' long daily "to do" lists). And yet another yet recurring theme is the benefit of a good, soul-cleansing cry. At least once in each movie, the protagonist walks off into a meadow or crouches down in a private corner and bawls, just open-mouthed, barking wails. Soothing music plays, and eventually the protagonist sniffles a little, wipes his face on both his sleeves, and goes back to face the problem.
I think this is what I need to do. I need to have a good wail, with the snot and the tears, and the fragments of words. Dane Cook, by the way, has a hilarious bit in his routine about having a good, huge cry-- the lengths you go to to hide it, the things you say mid-cry, the sad life events you'll think up just to keep crying, and just how good it feels.
Think I may give it a try.
The first time I got "heartache" was in 2004 about a week after Pants went off to Officer Candidate School. I was pulling long commutes to a very stressful (but good) job, and planning our wedding and simultaneous relocation only a few months away, and drinking extravagant amounts of coffee. My shoulders had risen to ear level and the muscles had hardened and clenched so much that patches of my scalp would go numb for long periods. I was getting headaches from grinding my teeth, and all my nails were chewed and picked down to raw, pink stumps.
In other words, I was a lovely calming presence who didn't at all need a firm shaking and a large martini.
One day at work, shortly after Hurricane Ivan had stomped all over Pants and his terrified, half-starved OCS classmates and destroyed our future hometown, I started having chest pains, like someone had walked up and socked me right in the sternum-- in fact, right in the manubrium, a term I inexplicably remember from high school anatomy.* Everything I'd ever heard about having chest pains indicated that it was Bad, so for once, I actually disengaged myself from the permanent ass grooves in my squeaky work chair and went to a minor emergency center.
(* Mrs. Jacobs, if you're out there, you gave me a C but you're my hero. You taught me so much medical Latin, and the day you came tip-toeing over in your squeaky shoes and told me that mine was the most delicately dissected rat brain you'd ever seen, and then plunked it into a bottle of preservative, I positively glowed.)
Minor emergency centers, in my experience, are usually leisurely places with large waiting rooms, like the broad, stagnant places in a stream where debris eddies, lingers, spins, and waits for an indeterminate time before finally catching the current and moving on again. Even if, say, you are suffering the acute misery of a urinary tract infection, you will linger and suffer with the rest of the lingering and suffering readers of old issues of Parenting magazine until someone remembers you in your purgatory and at last calls your name.
But not, as it turns out, if you're experiencing chest pains. Chest pains are the golden ticket that whisk you right through the double doors and in to see a chipper, young Asian doctor, who will palpate, thump, probe, and squeeze various parts of you while asking a dizzying variety of questions. As it turned out, every test came up fine until she asked me if perhaps I was under any stress at home or at work, to which I replied, "Not that I'm aware of," and then suddenly, to both our surprise, burst into hiccuping tears.
After I'd explained briefly about the situation with Pants, the wedding, and the move, she laughed and said "I think what you've got is heartache," and advised that I try to relax a little.
Hayao Miyazaki is a brilliant maker of animated Japanese children's movies-- Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle are two of my favorites-- and his approach to children's animation is refreshingly anti-Disney. For instance, none of his characters are either all good or all bad, and all are shown to be capable of change, in contrast to Disney films where the moral line is drawn with fierce and unrelenting certainty. Other themes in Miyazaki movies include the spiritual and emotional benefits of performing daily chores (I would have hated that as a kid, but as an adult I find it comforting, and am suddenly grateful for my parents' long daily "to do" lists). And yet another yet recurring theme is the benefit of a good, soul-cleansing cry. At least once in each movie, the protagonist walks off into a meadow or crouches down in a private corner and bawls, just open-mouthed, barking wails. Soothing music plays, and eventually the protagonist sniffles a little, wipes his face on both his sleeves, and goes back to face the problem.
I think this is what I need to do. I need to have a good wail, with the snot and the tears, and the fragments of words. Dane Cook, by the way, has a hilarious bit in his routine about having a good, huge cry-- the lengths you go to to hide it, the things you say mid-cry, the sad life events you'll think up just to keep crying, and just how good it feels.
Think I may give it a try.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
7 Ways to Improve January
This winter I've resolved to cut down on everything, including movement and thinking. Hopefully this conscientious decision will free up at least a little global intellectual bandwidth and personal space, and with the savings, God can get to work on the to-do list I've sent him. To whit:
1. Find and return George W. Bush's conscience. I've given up hope on the search for the brain, but maybe he could get back the moral compass? Last night I had the choice of joining the wives for Bunko or listening to the Regrettable State of the Divided Union address, and I did neither, opting instead to cower in my freezing living room watching the glorified murdering spree of Wyatt Earp.
2. Dissuade and punish whoever's been funneling motor oil and ground glass into my sinuses and chest cavity every night for the past week. Your holy laxity in this task has emboldened the perpetrator, and they've taken to doing the same thing to my husband, who whimpers and snuffles in his sleep when he's sick. While this is cute and somewhat endearing, it quickly gets old and I have to elbow him. Lovingly.
3. Bring back the sun. Just for a few hours, just so I can remember what the world looks like when it's not smothering under a sodden, gray wool blanket. This is why I hate January, and why:
4. There must be a new January holiday, just to help out MLK Day in breaking up the cold, tooth-gnashing sameness of long, old, regular January. It should be around about now, definitely after the 20th but before the 31st, and it should celebrate millinery. This is because I happen to look great in hats, and more people should wear them, ( like this!) so that I can justify buying myself lots of different ones and stacking them in colorful, artsy boxes in my closet, and proving to all my superior hat-wearing ability.* Ritualized consumption of nacho cheese and fine lager should also be involved.
Addendum to #4: Find a milliner in need of a muse. Something about my ridiculously tiny head, perhaps its ridiculous tiny-ness, has inspired more than one bored friend to attempt balancing things atop it. I think this curious head-magnetism is part of the secret to my hat prowess.
5. Stop making my car invisible to everyone else in bad weather. Apparently when the world is rainy and fog-covered, my car is the exact color of rain and fog, and I become this Un-car, this moving void through which pick-ups with too damn many tires are tempted to pass. This makes me tense, and contributes to the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.
6. Get rid of the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.
7. Keep things like this away from me when I should be concentrating on being productive. (I'll save you some time, oh Lord, on this link: don't click on any of them, just read the captions. The captions and the pictures are way funnier than the actual act of crying, or in most of these cases, faking crying, while eating. The concept itself is interesting though-- when was the last time I cried while eating? The disclaimer at the bottom of the page claims that it's good for you, and in a philosophical sense, I'll buy that-- expressing grief while nourishing the body is an act of hope, like, yes things suck right now, but if I continue to fuel this body and propel it through life, maybe the suck will let up. Ah-- now I remember: Kettle Corn, and because of fleeting, bittersweet nostalgia.)
So now that I've laid out all my requests in a sensible order, I plan to sit back, power down, and wait it out all Buddhist-like and calm, just letting things flow through me.... like all this congestion and rain...
1. Find and return George W. Bush's conscience. I've given up hope on the search for the brain, but maybe he could get back the moral compass? Last night I had the choice of joining the wives for Bunko or listening to the Regrettable State of the Divided Union address, and I did neither, opting instead to cower in my freezing living room watching the glorified murdering spree of Wyatt Earp.
2. Dissuade and punish whoever's been funneling motor oil and ground glass into my sinuses and chest cavity every night for the past week. Your holy laxity in this task has emboldened the perpetrator, and they've taken to doing the same thing to my husband, who whimpers and snuffles in his sleep when he's sick. While this is cute and somewhat endearing, it quickly gets old and I have to elbow him. Lovingly.
3. Bring back the sun. Just for a few hours, just so I can remember what the world looks like when it's not smothering under a sodden, gray wool blanket. This is why I hate January, and why:
4. There must be a new January holiday, just to help out MLK Day in breaking up the cold, tooth-gnashing sameness of long, old, regular January. It should be around about now, definitely after the 20th but before the 31st, and it should celebrate millinery. This is because I happen to look great in hats, and more people should wear them, ( like this!) so that I can justify buying myself lots of different ones and stacking them in colorful, artsy boxes in my closet, and proving to all my superior hat-wearing ability.* Ritualized consumption of nacho cheese and fine lager should also be involved.
Addendum to #4: Find a milliner in need of a muse. Something about my ridiculously tiny head, perhaps its ridiculous tiny-ness, has inspired more than one bored friend to attempt balancing things atop it. I think this curious head-magnetism is part of the secret to my hat prowess.
5. Stop making my car invisible to everyone else in bad weather. Apparently when the world is rainy and fog-covered, my car is the exact color of rain and fog, and I become this Un-car, this moving void through which pick-ups with too damn many tires are tempted to pass. This makes me tense, and contributes to the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.
6. Get rid of the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.
7. Keep things like this away from me when I should be concentrating on being productive. (I'll save you some time, oh Lord, on this link: don't click on any of them, just read the captions. The captions and the pictures are way funnier than the actual act of crying, or in most of these cases, faking crying, while eating. The concept itself is interesting though-- when was the last time I cried while eating? The disclaimer at the bottom of the page claims that it's good for you, and in a philosophical sense, I'll buy that-- expressing grief while nourishing the body is an act of hope, like, yes things suck right now, but if I continue to fuel this body and propel it through life, maybe the suck will let up. Ah-- now I remember: Kettle Corn, and because of fleeting, bittersweet nostalgia.)
So now that I've laid out all my requests in a sensible order, I plan to sit back, power down, and wait it out all Buddhist-like and calm, just letting things flow through me.... like all this congestion and rain...
Monday, August 14, 2006
Lysol for the soul
Right now, surgeons could operate on my kitchen floor. Babies could eat out of my bathtub. People with no immune systems could crawl face down across my living room carpet, inhaling deeply, and there would be nary a sneeze. Why?
This is what I do when things get on top of me-- I go hunting the source of my discomfort with a bottle of bleach and an old toothbrush. Surely it's the scum around the bathtub drain that's making me feel like this! Or the dust on the window sills! Or the crumb tray in the toaster! Whatever it is, I'm convinced that if I look hard enough, and scrub hard enough, I'll find it.
Right now the floors are so spotless they squeak under my feet, and somewhere off at the other end of the house, the cat is sneezing out carpet freshener from his hiding place under the bed. As for the dog, her shepherding ancestry is keeping her vigilant-- something is wrong with one of the flock, and she tails me from room to room, ears flat, eyes sharp, waiting.
I've seen my psychologist once, about a month ago, and until the end of this month, I'm to wait out scheduling conflicts and his yearly vacation, and keep a journal of my emotional responses to food, stress, all the usual suspects.
Usually journal writing is something I'm good at, and something that helps, but lately it's felt like the unsettling equivalent of milking a rattlesnake's fangs into a glass-- what do you do with the venom if you can't figure out the cure?
The journal I'm writing in has a painting on the front that used to be one of my favorites:
The full title of the painting is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening," and next to "The Temptation of St. Anthony," it's my favorite Salvador Dali painting. I read that what he did for this painting, and for many others, was to sit in a comfortable chair with a key in his hand, and a saucer on the floor directly beneath his hand. Then he'd nod off. When he was relaxed enough for his hand to drop the key, it would hit the plate and waken him, and he'd immediately paint whatever messed up dream image was in his head right at that moment. Hence, a woman being menaced by a rifle coming out of two tigers coming out of a fish coming out of a pomegranate with a spindly-legged circus elephant strolling in the background. Happens to me all the time.
But last night as I was unable to sleep and trying desperately to milk the venom out of my own head, I saw something new in the painting that disturbed me. In so many ways, it's an accurate picture of bulimia-- all kinds of hidden menaces rocketing out of a single piece of food and mounting a direct attack on the exposed body, a body which seems blissfully unaware of what's about to hit it. And the elephant in the background-- when you look at "The Temptation of St. Anthony," those circus elephants seem to represent all kinds of impossibly sinful decadence, the frightening excesses that tempt us all. Thin enough, pretty enough, strong enough-- the promises that draw me further and further out.
I stopped writing last night, unsure of whether it's a good idea to relax and let the key drop. What if the ultimate answer in all of this is that I'm just not equipped to handle the life I've chosen? Would I be willing, then, to let go of the compensation of fixating on food and weight if it meant I had to look harder at how I deal with stress (which seems to be the one element of the equation that's not going anywhere)?
Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Judging my aggressively sparkling house, I am reading too much into this. One thing I've learned though-- one morning of slinging bleach is no match for years of built up grime.
This is what I do when things get on top of me-- I go hunting the source of my discomfort with a bottle of bleach and an old toothbrush. Surely it's the scum around the bathtub drain that's making me feel like this! Or the dust on the window sills! Or the crumb tray in the toaster! Whatever it is, I'm convinced that if I look hard enough, and scrub hard enough, I'll find it.
Right now the floors are so spotless they squeak under my feet, and somewhere off at the other end of the house, the cat is sneezing out carpet freshener from his hiding place under the bed. As for the dog, her shepherding ancestry is keeping her vigilant-- something is wrong with one of the flock, and she tails me from room to room, ears flat, eyes sharp, waiting.
I've seen my psychologist once, about a month ago, and until the end of this month, I'm to wait out scheduling conflicts and his yearly vacation, and keep a journal of my emotional responses to food, stress, all the usual suspects.
Usually journal writing is something I'm good at, and something that helps, but lately it's felt like the unsettling equivalent of milking a rattlesnake's fangs into a glass-- what do you do with the venom if you can't figure out the cure?
The journal I'm writing in has a painting on the front that used to be one of my favorites:
The full title of the painting is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening," and next to "The Temptation of St. Anthony," it's my favorite Salvador Dali painting. I read that what he did for this painting, and for many others, was to sit in a comfortable chair with a key in his hand, and a saucer on the floor directly beneath his hand. Then he'd nod off. When he was relaxed enough for his hand to drop the key, it would hit the plate and waken him, and he'd immediately paint whatever messed up dream image was in his head right at that moment. Hence, a woman being menaced by a rifle coming out of two tigers coming out of a fish coming out of a pomegranate with a spindly-legged circus elephant strolling in the background. Happens to me all the time.
But last night as I was unable to sleep and trying desperately to milk the venom out of my own head, I saw something new in the painting that disturbed me. In so many ways, it's an accurate picture of bulimia-- all kinds of hidden menaces rocketing out of a single piece of food and mounting a direct attack on the exposed body, a body which seems blissfully unaware of what's about to hit it. And the elephant in the background-- when you look at "The Temptation of St. Anthony," those circus elephants seem to represent all kinds of impossibly sinful decadence, the frightening excesses that tempt us all. Thin enough, pretty enough, strong enough-- the promises that draw me further and further out.
I stopped writing last night, unsure of whether it's a good idea to relax and let the key drop. What if the ultimate answer in all of this is that I'm just not equipped to handle the life I've chosen? Would I be willing, then, to let go of the compensation of fixating on food and weight if it meant I had to look harder at how I deal with stress (which seems to be the one element of the equation that's not going anywhere)?
Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Judging my aggressively sparkling house, I am reading too much into this. One thing I've learned though-- one morning of slinging bleach is no match for years of built up grime.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Thank you, dead people
Last weekend I went to see the Bodyworlds exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
I was entirely unsure of how I'd react to a giant room full of real dead bodies carefully preserved in plastic and posed artistically-- I have an intense interest in human anatomy, both from a medical and an artistic perspective, but I've also got this nasty habit of hitting the floor in a dead, twitching faint when anyone gets near me with a needle or even talks convincingly about doing invasive medical things to me. So this weekend could have gone down one of two very different paths-- either I block the flow of museum foot traffic by stopping and sketching the exhibits, or I block museum foot traffic with my inert and unresponsive body, possibly bleeding from the head.
Thankfully, it was the sketching.
The full bodies were just as breath-taking as I'd imagined they would be. I had seen pictures of some of the posed bodies, but the amazing thing was being able to walk around them and sketch from different angles, seeing how the lines of each body, and the character of the pose as a whole, completely change relative to where you stand. Also, the eye-line of the body, where the person's gaze is trained, effects how you feel looking at it, even though these people are obviously dead and no longer looking at anything.
I've sketched living naked people before in a figure drawing class, and the gaze there was significant as well-- if someone's standing there naked and looking straight at you, it affects how you feel about standing there clothed and drawing them. Without getting too New Age-y about it, it's that their essential humanity, their nakedness, their quality of being stripped down to the common denominator of what makes us all human-- just a warm sack of bumpy skin with some battle scars-- is more intense when you know they can see you looking intently at them.
At the Houston exhibit, this feeling was much stronger. The exhibits had a quality of intimacy and sacredness that went far beyond that of a living naked person being studied for form and structure. These people were more naked than naked. Their ribcages were opened, their muscles were splayed back, detached from the bone to show the tendons beneath, their skulls were opened to show the cradled brain. And because I didn't know their names, because they would never be able to look back at me, looking at them and at the revealed mysteries of their insides, was something close to what it felt like to walk over the tombstones in the floor at Westminster Abbey. Gravity, reverence, awe.
What I wasn't expecting was how touching it would be to look at the isolated organ specimens. Laid out carefully in glass cases arranged in rows between the full body exhibits were samples of individual organs, both healthy and damaged, and grouped by systems-- skeletal, circulatory, digestive, nervous, reproductive, endocrine.
I was expecting to see these parts with a much more clinical eye, as things with less impact than if they had been part of a whole. I expected that if I was looking at a spleen, and I couldn't see who it had belonged to, then I could look at it as just a spleen, a thing that manages the recycling of old red blood cells. Without a body to put it into context, it would be like looking at any plastic model from a high school biology class.
But as I gazed down through the smudged fingerprints on the glass, I realized that I wasn't looking at a model, or at an organ with no body (or nobody) attached, I was looking at my own spleen, my very own lungs tired from running, my long-suffering stomach.
Each organ became a humble and heroic reflection of my own, and if it's not too weird to say, I felt a real wave of sympathy looking down at that stomach. It was so small, and so simple-- just a sack with some tubes-- and here I've been waging this war on my own, demanding that it not only digest whatever food I allow it to keep, but also that it bear the weight of all my stress, and in return all I do is ignore its distress signals. Poor little thing, I thought.
For so long I've been worried about whether or not problems with my health show from the outside, but in the margins of my sketches, among notes I took on what other people were saying when they looked at the exhibits ("I don't smoke that much," and "Dude, that's what my dad's liver must look like"), is the phrase "Whatever you do on the outside eventually shows up on the inside."
I have nothing but the deepest gratitude for the people who donated their bodies for this exhibit.
I was entirely unsure of how I'd react to a giant room full of real dead bodies carefully preserved in plastic and posed artistically-- I have an intense interest in human anatomy, both from a medical and an artistic perspective, but I've also got this nasty habit of hitting the floor in a dead, twitching faint when anyone gets near me with a needle or even talks convincingly about doing invasive medical things to me. So this weekend could have gone down one of two very different paths-- either I block the flow of museum foot traffic by stopping and sketching the exhibits, or I block museum foot traffic with my inert and unresponsive body, possibly bleeding from the head.
Thankfully, it was the sketching.
The full bodies were just as breath-taking as I'd imagined they would be. I had seen pictures of some of the posed bodies, but the amazing thing was being able to walk around them and sketch from different angles, seeing how the lines of each body, and the character of the pose as a whole, completely change relative to where you stand. Also, the eye-line of the body, where the person's gaze is trained, effects how you feel looking at it, even though these people are obviously dead and no longer looking at anything.
I've sketched living naked people before in a figure drawing class, and the gaze there was significant as well-- if someone's standing there naked and looking straight at you, it affects how you feel about standing there clothed and drawing them. Without getting too New Age-y about it, it's that their essential humanity, their nakedness, their quality of being stripped down to the common denominator of what makes us all human-- just a warm sack of bumpy skin with some battle scars-- is more intense when you know they can see you looking intently at them.
At the Houston exhibit, this feeling was much stronger. The exhibits had a quality of intimacy and sacredness that went far beyond that of a living naked person being studied for form and structure. These people were more naked than naked. Their ribcages were opened, their muscles were splayed back, detached from the bone to show the tendons beneath, their skulls were opened to show the cradled brain. And because I didn't know their names, because they would never be able to look back at me, looking at them and at the revealed mysteries of their insides, was something close to what it felt like to walk over the tombstones in the floor at Westminster Abbey. Gravity, reverence, awe.
What I wasn't expecting was how touching it would be to look at the isolated organ specimens. Laid out carefully in glass cases arranged in rows between the full body exhibits were samples of individual organs, both healthy and damaged, and grouped by systems-- skeletal, circulatory, digestive, nervous, reproductive, endocrine.
I was expecting to see these parts with a much more clinical eye, as things with less impact than if they had been part of a whole. I expected that if I was looking at a spleen, and I couldn't see who it had belonged to, then I could look at it as just a spleen, a thing that manages the recycling of old red blood cells. Without a body to put it into context, it would be like looking at any plastic model from a high school biology class.
But as I gazed down through the smudged fingerprints on the glass, I realized that I wasn't looking at a model, or at an organ with no body (or nobody) attached, I was looking at my own spleen, my very own lungs tired from running, my long-suffering stomach.
Each organ became a humble and heroic reflection of my own, and if it's not too weird to say, I felt a real wave of sympathy looking down at that stomach. It was so small, and so simple-- just a sack with some tubes-- and here I've been waging this war on my own, demanding that it not only digest whatever food I allow it to keep, but also that it bear the weight of all my stress, and in return all I do is ignore its distress signals. Poor little thing, I thought.
For so long I've been worried about whether or not problems with my health show from the outside, but in the margins of my sketches, among notes I took on what other people were saying when they looked at the exhibits ("I don't smoke that much," and "Dude, that's what my dad's liver must look like"), is the phrase "Whatever you do on the outside eventually shows up on the inside."
I have nothing but the deepest gratitude for the people who donated their bodies for this exhibit.
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