Body Worlds with my Mom

Yes, the tickets are a bit pricy, but the exhibition Body Worlds 3 was very interesting and worth the money paid. If you haven’t heard about it, a man named Gunther von Hagans back in the 70’s invented a process called “plastination”. Basically he found a way to preserve the body by vacuuming out our fat and liquid and injecting all of our body parts (dead mind you) with either plastic, or other materials that preserve the shape and even the color of the parts. Ok, so that description may not be medically accurate, but you get the idea.

Anyway, my mom and I took a day off on Wednesday and headed down to The Leonardo in SLC to take a look. Way back in my college days I was totally interested in the brain and how it functions and considered becoming a brain surgeon (yes I’m being serious), but alas I decided to study how the brain things about math instead. Anyway, I took an awesome anatomy and physiology class from Dr. Anderson at USU. It was an extremely hard class but I’m always open to a challenge, and boy did I come out with a lot of knowledge. However, book knowledge is one thing, but to see how things actually look in the body is amazing.

This is what I walked away with…a respect for my body and a desire to grow my heart to near the size of Lance Armstrong. I’m amazed and in awe that we are so complex and that so much detail can fit into our relatively small bodies. And yet, I know that what I saw is just what is visible to the naked eye. The detail goes much much deeper than that.

If you have the chance and some extra dollars laying around, take a gander. Oh, but be warned there was one exhibit that shook me up a little. There are fetus’ of all gestational ages. Heartbreaking – especially having gone into labor at 18 weeks, and almost losing my three babies.