"It's just like peeling an orange peel!"

Mood: Busy (wait, is that a mood? I feel busy. Hmm. I guess so.)

Music: The Postal Service - "Such Great Heights"

Medicine: Anatomy - Studying the Leg (catching up) & Dissecting the Neck

"It's just like peeling an orange peel!"

"Except that you're peeling a face."

...

Our humor and satisfaction with dissecting becomes more and more morbid with each new adventure in the anatomy lab. Looking back on the very first day we started, I remember we were terrorized by the thought of even touching the body and moving it to a new position. Flipping the cadaver over was foreign and disturbing, and potentially nausea inducing. It was a very serious endeavor. No one was smiling.

Fast forward to today: 5 months later. The cadaver is completely disfigured from its original shape, possessing only one leg still attached to the body, a full dissection of the pelvic muscles and organs, and abdominal and thoracic contents that are exposed to the elements. At the beginning of the dissection, the cadavers were lying face down on the tables. And. We had to flip them over. For the sake of not grossing you out too much, I won't go into much detail... but let's just say this was a challenging task, in lieu of the cadaver's most current form. If we had done this on the very first dissection, guaranteed someone would have feinted, or at least spewed some chunks. But my partner and I couldn't stop laughing at the hilarity and ridiculousness of the situation: body parts falling out, catching them, and trying to place them back correctly like a puzzle... it kind of reminded me of the straw man in the Wizard of Oz, stuffing his hay back into his body. It was the same thing, except in our case, it was very, very juicy hay.

Returning to dissections after spring break feels great! Again, there's something so satisfying about pulling away the fascial layers, uncovering different muscles, nerves, and blood vessels. Of course, that's when it yields results.

Today, we dissected the posterior triangle of the neck, and were told to particularly pay attention to making a clean dissection of the nerves and vessels in the area. When choosing a cadaver to work with, I immediately went to the biggest body, thinking to myself, "hey, since he's this big, he'll have huge vessels and nerves that will be so easy to identify." Nuh uh. Not the case. It just meant he had a lot of tissue to clean out. Also, it meant that every little, inconsequential branch of nerves appeared sizable. And seeing as the main priority of our dissection was to preserve about 5 or 6 important nerves, my partner and I spent the better part of the dissection *attempting* to salvage nearly every random bundle of prominent stringy tissue attached to the subcutaneous layer of the skin, thinking they were in some way relevant. Lots of fun.

Well, my sarcasm is half true. It's frustrating to work so long on inconsequential aspects of our dissection, but at the same time it's so fun to explore the human body. We learn by visualization, and I don't think there's any better way than the hands on approach.

Okay, now I need to get studying for real. Hope you enjoyed my macabre descriptions and humor!

"And I have to speculate that God himself did make us into corresponding shapes, like puzzle pieces from the clay"