Bloody Valentine's

OK, since I wrote just a few days ago, this one should be short. But, since I just had the best Valentine's day ever, I had to share. Pretty much none of this e-mail is safe for those who are sensitive. Skip to last paragraph if you need to (but then the e-mail is rather boring). So here goes:

Today, I was up to my elbows in the chest cavity - well, maybe just mid-forearms. I had to cut off the rib cage with an electric autopsy saw, remove the front part of my cadaver's chest and cut out both lungs. It is amazing how the chest cavity just pops off like the hood of a car. Since neither of the other girls wanted to have this duty, I zealously took it on… I wondered if there was something wrong with my enthusiasm but I was assured by my professors that I was perfectly normal - among a certain crowd. ;-) So a few things I learned today:

Even though an electric saw (think of an electric pizza cutter with a serrated blade) can cut through bone like butter, it cannot cut through flesh and muscle.

That bone, when getting cut, smells like Fritos.

The lungs are HUGE. Find your clavicle - go ahead - you have the uppermost part of your lung under that! Yes, they come up into the neck shoulder region.

Now a word from the stop smoking campaign. The lungs of a smoker are as dense as bricks and just as heavy. Parts of them just die and atrophy in the body and leave black marks on the surrounding cavity. They are black and heavy, the feel nothing like the healthy tissue (kind of spongy) of the other cadavers. And the tumors are astounding. They exist inside and outside the lungs. They grow on the muscle that your lungs sit on - they spread everywhere. It wasn't the black lungs that got me, it was the accompanying tumors that couldn't get over. Where flesh should have been smooth it was like someone put a layer of large rocks under the muscle in the entire chest cavity. I can't even begin to describe this in words that don’t sound cliché. But seeing it puts a whole new perspective on things.

Oh, and the most ironic and mildly sick part of my dissection today (and I find most humorous since it was Valentine's day): I had to remove all the skin off the abdominal region down into the "inguinal" region. This is where the male plumbing comes through abdominal muscles to enter the... Um… family jewel chest. Yeah - the place where a hernia is likely to happen in little boys. I actually saw a female with a hernia today in that same region - that is rare. So, I had my face and fingers in my cadaver's um… family jewel chest today. Joy! We do have to dissect everything and they mean everything. We don’t get embarrassed about it in front of the other students (last week we had to cut a female breast in half) , but relaying it to you all makes me remember that it is not normal… but all joking aside, it is very fascinating how this area develops. Did you know that the testes, during development are actually located in the lower back?

And as for my latest exam: pretty much the entire class failed the physiology exam we had on Monday - class average was a 65 (and nothing below a 70 is passing). I got a 70. Mild anxiety attack there but not surprised. There are 2 more exams for this class - hopefully it will get better. I studied at least 30 hours for that exam. Oy vey.

Ok, Happy Valentine's Day and I hope you all enjoyed the update!!

Jess

Over the First Hill and Charging the Second

After weeks of studying 5-9 hours a day, eating more Fazoli's and Panera than I care to think about (they have free wi-fi and let you study there for hours for little money), the first big one is over. The cadaver portion was a lot easier than I thought and the written portion was a LOT harder than I thought. I wouldn't have been surprised to get a C overall, but would have been happier with a B. The whole thing took from 1pm to about 6pm. Then we all hit up BW3 for a little hot wing action where one of our classmates, Adam-Paul, took on the Blazin' Wing Challenge to eat 12 of their hottest wings in 6 minutes. He had to sign a waver that if he got sick, he couldn't sue them. He did it in just over three minutes. We were impressed, but the timekeeper at BW3 said she had seen it done in just over two. We were proud none less. See attached photo and caption at the bottom of this message.

So, you want some interesting educational/cadaver tidbits? That is what everyone seems to enjoy. So, if you are sensitive, you know what to do - skip this section!

Did you know that the bones we study on (not the ones in the cadaver, but the ones that are clean and in drawers) are 1) real, 2) "cleaned" by grubs and beetles by some outfit in Egypt? Yep, they toss these bones with muscle, ligaments, tendons, fat, veins, etc into a container, toss a few hungry beetles in with them and a few days later, voila! Clean bones. Finger lick'n good I tell you.

That the muscle on a cadaver starts to look like dried out beef jerky after it has been dissected and left out with out being properly moistened?

That the viens, still many with coagulated blood in them, look like dried out worms after a rain storm comes and then the sun fries them on the cement. It is not pretty.

That the longer the cadavers sit in their stainless steel bread boxes (called clam shells), the worse they smell? We drain off about 1-2 gallons of fluid from them every few days. We add about 1/2 gallon of cadaver moistening fluid, which by the way, smells like ben gay, every time we close them up to try and keep them moist.

That their joints are getting really stiff and so they are often stuck in really bizarre and unnatural positions. It is not uncommon to have to shove their arms and legs into the clam shell as you are closing it because they keep popping back into those weird positions...

We came into the lab one day to discover that several of the bodies had had one leg sawed off so that we can see a cross section of the hip. Their legs were not laid on the table in the same direction, so it was a little freaky at first.

There really is such a thing as a "dead weight". Our little guy weighs a ton. All the people at my table are tiny girls so when we try to lift him, flip him over - and he is slippery (remember the chicken fat stories I shared) - it often doesn't go well. Not to mention that his entire upper limbs and chest/back is completely dissected so it is hard to keep the arms in a normal position. One of the other cadavers is so heavy that they have to have lab assistance to change her position. One of her breast weighted over 8 pounds (we had to cut them off in the beginning of the semester). Last time they flipped her, one of her prosected breasts flopped onto the floor (they had to keep them) and left a huge greasy mess.

One time, we had to put a chest block under him to raise him up and when wee put him back down on it, all his ribs cracked from the weight of his own body. It was the grossest sound ever - reminded me of when I crack two of my ribs canoeing but many times worse.

OK, I think that is all the stories I have for now. Next test: physiology - in 6 days - which no one has looked at because the anatomy had us all freaked out. I now know more about the physiology behind Viagra than I ever wanted to know. The instructors are all research folks so there is a LOT of practical application in every class. ;-) But in all seriousness - I have learned a ton from them and it is a lot of fun. Though we all tell really nerdy jokes the more we learn.
Oh, by the way, grades were posted this morning - I got an A on the fist exam. It was a low A, but an A none the less. I will take it. And I would like to thank my study partner - Chad - for all his patience with my brief crying spell in the lab because I couldn't for the life of me remember the muscle attachments of the flexors of the upper arm. Yes, it is stressful and the strangest things set folks off. ;-)

Later,
Jess