Rand Paul in Serious Pain - I Hope He Avoids Opioid Addiction

[Grammy23]

14. Interesting notion about Paul finding out about pain the hard way.

It is one thing to know about it in an abstract way. Another entirely to experience it personally. He is a medical doctor and should have a better understanding than most of us of the medical process of having pain. But there is NOTHING like knowing first hand about pain to give him a clue of the amount of suffering some injuries can cause.

As an aside, I took a Forensic Anthropology course in college. On the first day of class we were each given a cardboard box of bones. (They came from people who donated their bodies to science/research or whose bodies went unclaimed.) Our assignment was to put together a forensic report telling as much as we could glean from the bones and using formulas to estimate height, weight and gender and cause of death, if possible. It was a gruesome task, at first, but in pretty short order I got accustomed to handling the bones and working on my assignment.

One of the first things I did was start arranging the bones in some semblance of a skeleton. There were missing bones and animal bones thrown in to some of the boxes to complicate the task. What became apparent immediately with several of the ribs in my box was the person had, at some point in life, had a number of broken ribs. The breaks came at an angle across the ribs, indicating at least three broken ribs. But the most striking feature was the huge calcification on the back side of several of the ribs where they had healed. They were large boney projections that I can’t help but believe MUST have caused a considerable amount of pain after they were healed because of their size and location.

I thoroughly enjoyed that class (once I got over the shock of carrying around a box of human bones and having a skull on my kitchen counter while I worked on my report!) It gave me a great appreciation for the work that forensic scientists from various fields do in determining what happened to a person during life and, if possible, how they died.