Six weeks into my final term of this 2 year remedial massage therapy program, (at
the Massage Therapy College of Manitoba) and I have completed the required 200 hours of practice time! Yay. Of course I will continue to practice, (otherwise how can I expect to pass all these exams?) but it's nice to have the 200 behind me. In addition to this 200 hours of both supervised and unsupervised, (but in school) practice time, we also work our way through four rounds of clinic, three different outreach programs, at least two events, a thirty hour (or more) practicum and a ten hour case study. This adds up to an additional 200 hours of massage time with the general public. Four hundred massages and counting. Wow hey?!?
An intense two years to be sure, but well worth it as we end up feeling confident and comfortable in assessing and treating musculoskeletal based concerns by the time we graduate. Good news for the graduate, Great news for the public ;) It is astounding how much there is to learn about the body, astounding. Daily I am blown away. Why we spend any time looking for aliens or any other spacial bodies, is beyond me, considering what we have yet to learn about our own beings.
I have been entranced by the human body, it's structure and function over these past almost two years. Granted, I came into this with very little knowledge of anatomy and physiology, having always just accepted and believed that bodies work. What little I did have going for me, centered almost entirely around the process of childbearing and delivery, and even that was less text bound and more experiential. One day in my freshman term, I met my radius. I was captivated. Never in all the time I had been alive (and it feels like it's been awhile now haha), had I thought to wonder how it is that my forearm can pivot like it does. It's actually an amazing little bit of machinery we have there. Did you know that the ulna doesn't move, and the radius does all the dancing about? Go ahead feel your bones ;) There is a special ligament, positioned ever so cleverly, that allows free spinning of the radial head to accommodate that fancy twisting we do with our forearms. Good thing too, cause if we only had anatomical positioning (palms up folks), there would be no keyboarding! It was during freshman term that I realized I am a bit of a bone junkie.... the skeleton is just the ultimate puzzle! (and if you know me, you know I love puzzles)
That same term we had to learn all sorts of interesting things about the way the body works, aka: physiology. One of my favourite aspects of this learning, was and is the sheer beauty of the way we are. There is gorgeousness to be found in the design and symmetry all throughout our beings, down to the cellular level. During our study of how red blood cells are transported around (limited learning I might add, this is just to give us a basic understanding of what is happening inside), I discovered the following factoid in my A& P text:
"Hemoglobin is made up of the protein globin bound to the red heme pigment. Each heme group bears an atom of iron
set like a jewel in its center. A hemoglobin molecule can transport four molecules of oxygen. A single red blood cell contains about 250 million hemoglobin molecules, so each of these tiny cells can scoop up
about 1 billion molecules of oxygen!" (do I need to officially reference my textbook in my in my blog? Human Anatomy & Physiology-Marieb & Hoehn)
Did you catch that? We have jewels in our core and we are moving around trillions of molecules of oxygen with every breath we take. (breathing... a whole other subject of import) The average red blood cell takes about 60 seconds to complete a circuit, the circulatory system, you know our whole body.
60 seconds. Trillions. Astounding.
These are just a couple of the cool things I have discovered in the hours and hours of sitting at a table, wait until you hear about the stuff I have learned while working at the table for the last 400 hours :)
