God's creation is so fascinating. i'm dissecting the head and neck this week, trying to find and name the tiny nerves, the intricate arteries, the muscles that make the face so expressive. it's tedious work, and these days i'm exhausted by the time i get home. hours of bending over the body, cutting and probing and referencing a million books, learning what connects where and why and how. it's such an endless amount of detail to learn. more fascinating, however, is that the face just is. i have a face, i use it for a million things, and i didn't do a thing to make it work. but it does. what a gift that is. the more i learn, the more i realize how horrible pathology is. pathology - when something goes wrong, sometimes horribly and unexpectedly wrong. today i read a case about a woman who self-medicated a head cold and ended up in the hospital a week later with meningitis and a huge bacterial infection. she died another few weeks later. there's just so much that COULD go wrong, and the fact is that i never think about how many things are working right, all the time, and how miraculous that is. life, itself, is miraculous.