← Harold's Old Time Radio
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The rest of the story. Carl Weiland, driving down that narrow highway outside Brisbane, Australia, 1986, could not have imagined the nearness of death. But there it was. A huge tanker truck loaded with highly flammable fuel, and it was headed straight for him. The combined speed of both vehicles in that crash was 112 miles an hour. But incredibly, there was no explosion. Still no way the people in the automobile could possibly have survived, though they did. They did. Carl's daughter, Lisa, then 11, crawled out of the wreck with barely a scratch. Carl was a different story. Smashed bones, particularly facial bones. It would take five and a half months in the hospital to heal. They did not heal by themselves. In fact, Carl Weiland would require 55 separate major operations to put him back together again. Day after day, a battalion of brilliant physicians consulted, then plotted and performed procedures according to the specialty of. Of each. The plastic surgeons desperately trying to repair a multitude of obliterated bones. They needed healthy bone from the patient's own body for grafting. But each time Carl awakened from a new bone grafting surgery, he noticed through the anesthetic haze that the surgeon had returned to the same site in his body for the raw material. You see, Carl Weiland was a doctor, too. Family practice. But this was a new one. This was something he must have missed in med school. So later, after he was released from the hospital and fully recovered, Carl, now more curious than ever, asked Dr. David Pennington, how could the plastic surgeons keep going back to that same. That same bodily location for biographed material and not run out of bone? Aha, the surgeon replied. It was simple, because there was one type of bone in the human body which, as long as the periosteum remained intact, tended to grow back entirely each time it was removed. It grew back, of course, from the incision that kept getting reopened. Carl knew precisely what type of bone that was. Then it dawned on him, something he had read long ago in Sunday school, something that had, at that time, made no sense at all. But it did now. For, you see, the reconstructive material the surgeons used for Carl Weiland's plastic surgery, that bio stuff, mined from Carl's own body for the purpose of bone grafting, came from the patient's ribs. And yes, whole ribs had to be removed to get enough bone. That's when Carl, a doctor himself, learned from his surgical specialists about the boundless resources of bone in his body. One kind of bone with especially vigorous regenerative capacity. Genesis, chapter 2, verse 21. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and as he slept, he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh underneath. So the Bible says, but methodically, biologically, scientifically, men and women have the same number of ribs. So if, as some insist, the Adam and Eve story is that nothing more, then how could the ancient Hebrews ever have known that Adam's missing rib would grow back? How could they possibly have invented, or who could possibly have told them the rest of the story?