"Take my bones they are gone gone gone"

I research bone graft substitute markets. Yes I have a philosophy degree, no I do not have any qualifications in the field, why do you ask? Bone graft substitutes are things which surgeons use when they are trying to get bone to grow, and do not want to harvest bone from your hip (called an iliac crest harvesting procedure, icky.) Some are made of clay (synthetic), some of animals (xenograft), some of dead people (allograft). All of them make me very uneasy. I've learned a few things:

1. The other day it occured to me that the way I'd thought about bones my entire life was incorrect. I think about my skeleton like the frame of the fantastically complicated machine which is my body. This permenant, dead structure which prevents flopping about, but that's not it at all. Bones are alive, they bleed, and breath and shit just like every other cell in the body. There's a disease people get in which the top part of their hip dies and eventually disintegrates. The idea of a bone dying, not breaking, but dying was such a strange idea to me. In fact the whole understand of the body as a machine is ridiculous. For years we've thought that if you ran marathons, or lifted heavy weights you'd destroy your knees. Because, after all, if you drive your car long distances under heavy loads you eventually fuck up your car. But the body isn't a machine, it's more of an ecosystem, one which has to be stressed to prevent it from fading away. To remind your cells that they have a job to do. Amazing.

2. There are people who process tissue for a living. Can you imagine that? A life spent stripping tendons and ligaments from donated femurs. And here I thought forecasting the motherfucking markets was a hassle.

3. Orthopedic surgery dispels any notions I had about surgical precision. My office mate and I watched a video of a spinal fusion and man, did it involve at lot of banging on things. There are orthopedic surgical hammers. What do these large men do with these large, sterile, enormously expensive hammers? Oh, they pound large expensive nails into your spine. Wonderful, sign me up.

g.