"ACCEPT YOURSELF"

So, I went to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit last night. Because it's the final weekend, the museum is open 24 hours until Sunday, which I think is spectacular. So, my ticket was for 1am, as that seemed like a perfectly reasonable hour to see corpses.

As I have blogged before, I don't do too well with veins and needles. Drawing blood is an act of involuntary self-humiliation I avoid whenever possible. Just typing that make the tops of my feet and my hands feel weak. It's not pretty. It's terrible. I actually hurts my feelings and make this sob come from deep in my chest and I'm pretty shot for the day. So, I went to this exhibit as a gesture of stimuli confrontation therapy, I suppose. That and I, well, muscles and organs are really interesting to me. If I could have only gotten past the veins and arteries, an anatomy class would have been a field day. But, alas....

Anyway.

Aside from my screwed-up knee sympathetically aching as it remembered it's own ordeal as I walked through the knee injuries section, I did wonderfully. I had a moment when confronted with an entire arm of veins suspended in epoxy. I felt my feet go, felt my face flush, but took a breath and reminded myself, these are okay this is in my mind these are keeping me alive.

I had one of those strange teary moments, the ones that you never see coming but suddenly your breath catches and this gasp sort of comes from someplace else, when I saw a cadaver-segment representation of an ailment that threatened my father and that my grandfather succumbed to. I knew I'd see something like that, I was prepared to see something like that, but to turn into a room and actually see something like that is quite another matter.

Sure, research on cadavers like that one probably saved his life. It wasn't that. It was just seeing it there in front of me. Someone else's Dad. What my own Dad would have or could have been reduced to himself. Just one of those things you know the details of, but to see the details of, well, it's jarring.