That moment you mean to type “terms in anatomy” and instead accurately spell “terms in humanomy”.
I mean, technically I’m not wrong.
Then again there could be beaver anatomy or chinchilla anatomy or dinosaur anatomy–it’s not just all about us.
Be that as it may, I think I should coin the term “humanomy” to mean “the study of human anatomy” before some Ph.D out there decides to take all the credit. Us Undergrads can get wildly creative, as you can see.
*Fun Fact* If you google “humanomy”, you get a human anatomy book in Spanish on amazon. It’s 23 dollars if anyone is interested.
People wanted me to take human anatomy at my college, but I went in those labs a year ago, I saw those dead bodies with the white sheet on their face pulled so tight you can still make out the indent of their eyes, the tent pitched by their eroded nose, and the thin sliver between their upper and bottom lips. I’ve seen a girl, with the help of her trusty man-side kick, shove their hands into an abdominal cavity, and hoist up the intestines into a vertical angle until we could see the ridges of the spine. I saw the green spotted cirrhosis of the liver and some woman shoved a human heart in my face.
The thing is bigger than I thought.
Sights like those make me feel my organs, and I don’t like that.
I could handle the smell and I didn’t run out of the room like some people–a rather natural reaction to being crammed in a freezer lab with several dead bodies inches away from your supple, living flesh. You almost expect them to reach out and shake your hand and say “hey, nice day today, eh?”
But nope. They dead.
Instead, I looked around and wondered how many serial killers were being created that day.
I should clarify: I stood there in the middle of a freezer with dead bodies, grinning to myself and thinking about serial killers. I’m not creepy at all.
I’ve been a little off this morning. Hence the serial killer stuff.
Because I’ve been drinking more water and getting a little bit of exercise, my energy level has been exceptional, and last night I couldn’t sleep. My class is at 8 a.m. I tossed and turned until 2:30 worrying about the fact that I couldn’t sleep and that worry made me worry farther about my worry.
Meta-worrying.
It’s the conceited, mangled cousin of Meta-cognition.
Whenever I have trouble falling asleep I have trouble distinguishing my dreams from reality. Several times I saw a person standing in my room at the foot of my bed with blonde hair, distorted, pulling at her/his hair and face and skin and silently screaming. Spiders crowded in the corner and there were conversations I had with no one in particular, conversations I can’t remember fully.
I woke at 6:30, the time I wanted to, and felt perplexed by the voices I heard in the other room but figured I was dreaming again.
When I woke up a few minutes later I learned my father had yet another seizure (or set of seizures) and his blood pressure was 252/190.
If you’re not medical savvy or have never paid attention to your check ups in the doctor offices, you might not know what a normal level is. A normal level is 120/80.
He hasn’t been drinking.
We’ve been giving him his blood pressure medication; my mother gives him the night pill because he forgets they’re for his blood pressure and ends up poppin’ them like sleeping pills.
The morning pills are harder to regulate. But he usually remembers to take them.
I theorized he had another one of his “temporal” or partial seizures (whichever, it hasn’t even been officially diagnosed yet) that blossomed into a Grand Mal.
The doctors at the hospital, according to my mother, said seizures can also be caused by fatally high levels of blood pressure.
But there’s no way to tell if the blood pressure came before the seizures, or if the seizures came before the blood pressure, so to automatically assume either is rather irresponsible. It’s a correlational situation and all of us in the research, psychology and statistical world should know those can be relatively unreliable.
They’ve admitted him. Honestly, I think it’s time he see both a neurologist and a cardiologist and get some liver tests done. It’s been 8-10 years since he had a mild heart attack and the doctors said he had congestive heart failure; he’s done nothing, since, in terms of heart health. He’s been an alcoholic or over thirty years, there’s no way all that acetaldehyde hasn’t taken it’s toll.
When you drink alcohol (in regards to those who drink a lot or are addicted), a liver enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase spurts into action. Yes, your liver specializes for these types of incidents. Respect your body.
But when it metabolizes, acetaldehyde, a naturally occurring biochemical Satan, births itself into existence. The alcohol isn’t what fucks you up, it’s all these metabolite dudes actively racing around your system like deranged toddlers on a sugar high.
Luckily your liver has an enzyme that breaks down that, too.
Fuck giving respect to celebrities for being stuck up little hoes, it’s time to turn that energy into yourself. Your body does more for you than you could even imagine.
Active acetaldehyde breaks down tissues. It’s a toxin. It’s usually what causes a lot of liver and tissue complications associated with alcoholism.
As you can see, this pharmacology class is paying off.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of this professors approaches to how he views his counseling field, or his view on addiction, but I think that’s the glory of learning.
If you boil life down into broth in your stainless steel pot, you’d see it’s just made up of perceptions and beliefs. They guide you, whether you acknowledge it or not. So, if you’re also inclined in the slightest to Ethics, or you just have some common sense, you would reason that taking and believing words from someone’s mouth just to believe it, just because they say it, just because they’re credible, is essentially letting them and their values, their morals, and their ethical standing, dictate how you make decisions in your life.
Therefore I take what I can learn about the physical body and brain from this class and I move on. I listen to ideas and I take them as just that: ideas. Ideas that someone came up with that may or may not be worth following. I’ll find out for myself.
When my father’s doctor says “it’s weird, your liver test came up with a hepatitis virus but it’s not showing up in your system” my first inclination is not relief, but skepticism. Perhaps its the beginning stages. Perhaps something wonky is going on with your tests. Perhaps he’s beginning that long path down the road of hepatitis and eventually cirrhosis if he doesn’t get his act together.
That’s one thing I’ll never agree on that my professor said:
“There are plenty resources in this town, it’s amazing how we’ve grown”.
That’s straight up bullshit. If you have great insurance and a great employer and make decent amounts of money, your resources are great. If you’re on county medicaid and your unemployed and depressed and an addict and get run around the system, you have two things working against you: socioeconomic status and personal motivation.
If he doesn’t want to take personal responsibility for his actions, that’s one thing. Being dragged through the mud over and over again is another.
At least the ones with the good insurance and tentative doctors have a chance to be properly educated and motivated a little.
Poverty effects the mind just as much as it does the finances.
Rant END.
MentalTruths 