ninanevermore

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about the bone graft the oral surgeon put in my jaw on Monday. More specifically, I was thinking about the cadavers it come from, and how I should never have asked where the bone for the graft came from because that is just the sort of thing I will obsess over.

When the surgeon, on my first visit, asked if I had any questions, I should have just said that I didn't. Instead, I asked about the source of the bone in the graft they were going to fill in my abscess with.

"It's cadaver bone," he said.

I thought about that for a moment. "Creepy," I said.

The doctor smiled. "A little, I guess."

A little? I have ground-up dead people in my jaw. What isn't creepy about that? It's a lot creepy, thank you very much.

My mind works that way. I'm the sort of person who wonders who they were. Is the bone from someone so altruistic that he or she wanted to donate every part of themselves for the betterment of other people? Or were they so hard up for cash that they took payment up front with the agreement that after they bought the farm their body could be harvested for everything they had? Maybe it was his family that made the decision.

"The drunk son-of-a-bitch walked on mom and us when we were kids," his son might have said, "We haven't heard from him in twenty years, and now you guys call us wanting us to spring for his burial? I don't think so. If anything, he owes us. How much can we get for his carcass, anyway? All of it, or just the pieces, whichever is more."

More than likely, it's from little bits of all of the above, processed in some sort of Soylent-Green type factory that grinds up all of the bone and ships them out to doctors who do bone grafts.

I really need to stop thinking about it.

I'll be much happier when I do.

I have dead people in my face.

I eat with them at every meal.

They help me chew.

Oh, yes. Creepy.

Definitely.