Tuesday, November 9, 2010

I've Been Everywhere

Anatomy is a great class. The lab may be killing my grade... but I still find it all so interesting! I learn so much at every lecture and I am always able to somehow share it with my roommates which is fun. My professor though, I am so amazed by her. She is awesome and seems to have done everything and I think that she is still fairly young. Last week she started a story with "While I was backpacking across Thailand..." and then went on to tell us how she was alone in the middle of the wilderness of Thailand and what she saw in the village she stopped at that related to the lecture. Her graduate thesis work at least partly consisted of walking around Seattle asking the homeless people their history and testing them for HIV and then going back to check on them every now and then, being the first to find some of them after they died. She spends the night outside at least two or three nights a week, ALL year round. Then today, she told us why she decided to go with anatomy. She had started her freshman year as an Elem Ed major but she took anatomy for fun. That summer she decided that she wanted to go to Alaska. She didn't have any money to do this, so she hitchhiked from Utah to Alaska, around Alaska, and back! On the way there, she was in the middle of the Yukon for a long time as no one was driving by. Finally a truck stopped but was full of people but they said she could squeeze in the back by a tarp if she wanted. She rode in the back of the truck for hours so at some point she decided to look under the tarp. It was a freshly shot deer. So as she had just taken anatomy, she stuck her hand under the tarp and started to feel it thinking of all the anatomy terms. When she got to the lungs they 'were like a security blanket'. She loves the feel of fresh lungs (they feel like clouds) and that is why she is not teaching second grade right now.
She just amazes me with all that she was done and seen, everywhere she's been, and all that she knows.