Anatomy Notes by an Anatomy Nerd

As many people know, I am a human anatomy nerd. As in, I took the class in high school, then in college, and then I took dissection and I became a TA so I could teach others about my passion. It's an odd thing to be passionate about and you don't even have to think about it for it to be odd. But I want to dedicate this blog post to WHY I loved my anatomy class and why anatomy essentially changed my entire view of what the human body is and how absolutely magnificent (cheesy word, but true) it is.

I was a little lost soul before I took anatomy. I wasn't sure what in the sam-hill I wanted to do with my life. Did I want to teach history, make movies, or did I want to go to medical school? It was all up in the air and I was so confused. I liked too many things and was indecisive. So, I signed up for what felt like a million different classes to help me decide. I took film, history, and anatomy in the same semester. And though many of the classes I had taken were biology based, anatomy was the first that really allowed me to study the human body in detail. Of course, I found that I wanted to spend all day in lecture, listening to information about how alveoli fill and collapse during breathing or how myosin heads attach to actin filaments during muscle contraction. There were days in lab when I would hold half of a human head in my left hand and a heart in my right, an experience few people ever have.

So here's the part where I gush about how amazing our bodies are. The human body is arguably the most complex thing known to man. We have a limited understanding of how it functions and, if I'm going to be honest, I don't think we will ever understand it. But think about it: though we don't understand a lot of it, what we DO understand is absolutely amazing. The fact that we can breathe, eat and digest, move, speak, and most of all THINK, is absolutely miraculous. Just to breathe, we contract muscles, the pressure changes in our chest cavity, cells use energy, and blood flows to the right places. And that's not even the half of it. On top of that, the molecular mechanisms we use just to breathe are so small and fast, no one even thinks twice about it.

And then I think about the fact that we can do everything at once. We can walk, eat, and even talk at the same time. We breathe and our hearts beat without us even thinking about it. We can even train our bodies to swim, or play soccer, or throw a football 50, 60, 70 yards (distance is one thing, but accuracy...I digress). I guess, to say the least, our bodies are pretty fantastic.



I don't usually post things like this, but this talk by an LDS church leader, Elder Russel M. Nelson, who was once a prominent cardiothoracic surgeon, is amazing. I particularly enjoy the first section entitled The Remarkable Human Body. Elder Nelson is pretty straightforward about the miracle that is the human body and is much more articulate than I am. If you want to, read and enjoy.

http://jesuschrist.lds.org/SonOfGod/eng/faith-in-jesus-christ/articles/faith-in-jesus-christ