Bone Lab Musings

I don't have any neat photos to post today. I don't take many while we are in the bone lab. Instead, you get my thoughts for the day.  Yay!

We spent the morning, like we have every morning so far, listening to our director do a bone review lecture. Today's was on the humerus, radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals and phalanges.  We are almost done with the osteological review and by day eight will have covered all 206 bones in the human body. Whew! (For those that are wondering, newborn babies still have just 206 bones, but the bones have tons of cartilage where the bone has not ossified, so the bones can have lots of pieces.)

The second half of the day is spent studying in the lab. I usually do crappy drawings of the bones and write in all the features I need to remember first. Man, I wish I could draw! Then I move to actual bones. We have a combination of adult and juvenile bones to work with which is cool because up to this point, I haven't had much experience with juvenile bones, so this has been an awesome, educational experience for me!

In addition to studying, we often wash bones in the courtyard.  We receive basins of water, a toothbrush, a pointed stick and a bag of bones to clean.  This is a good way to handle the bones more and get familiar with them. Plus, all of the bones need to be cleaned before they are analyzed and recorded. It's nice to sit in the sun for awhile too.

I washed two sets of bones today. One of my bags held the remains of a very young infant.  As I sat there carefully washing the grave dirt from them, I kept thinking that it was some one's tiny baby. Someone cried for it.  Someone cared enough to bury it. It kind of bummed me out. I usually try not to think about who the bones might have been. When we are handling bones so much, especially older ones, we really don't think about who they might have been. They become study aids, rather than human bones.  So, I guess this was a good reminder for me, even though it made me sad.