Counting Bones

When she was twenty-four years old, Ellen Anderson Penno lost her partner in a climbing accident while they were ascending Mount Baker in Washington’s Cascade Range. The avalanche hid his body in a crevasse just weeks before Anderson Penno was slated to begin medical school, and she soon found herself torn between deferring her studies for a year, or starting right away with a full course load.

Rather than succumbing to grief and risk never beginning her medical education at all, she plunged deep into her studies, surrounded by death on all sides, struggling to maintain her way through her turbulent emotions and a rigorous med school schedule.

In this stirring and often mordantly funny new memoir, Ellen Anderson Penno structures a story of mourning, loss, despair and love through the lens of the classic medical text Gray’s Anatomy, showing readers what becomes of those who must rebuild their lives after tragedy strikes.