The bee's knees

So this past week has been a hellish nightmare of a week. I am now capable of writing out biochemical pathways for an outrageous amount of reactions that occur in human metabolism. Chemicals, enzymes, inhibitors, competitive inhibitors, blah, blah, and more blah. It's all very fascinating I'm told.

However, I also got to see some pretty cool stuff this week, as well. In anatomy we covered the lower limbs, specifically the foot and the hand. The foot is one complicated piece of work. There are layers and layers of muscles in the human foot; each one serving some sort of purpose; either real or vestigial (such as our big toe, which has a lot of muscles that are similar to muscles in our thumbs but don't actually make our toe move in cool ways like our thumb anymore). However, the big toes is actually really important in keeping balance, it turns out. It allows our body to place all of our weight on the balls of our feet when we need to.

The really cool glimpse I got was when we got to the knee. When we opened up the knee to take a look at all the fragile little tendons that athletes injure (ACL, PCL and lateral collateral ligament - the "terrible triad"), what we saw shining back at us was a pristine, silver titanium knee joint. Two, actually, he'd had both knees replaced. So now I know what you're really made of, mom.