I think I've finally got used to dissection. Ive stopped noticing that its weird to be stood, scalpel in hand, in a room full of the living slowly stripping down cadavers to their very core. Its not strange that some of the bodies are hemi-faced, or mono-legged. Our demonstrator took us through the basics of an abdominal exam on Thursday and said 'What is the first thing you would notice if this lady (gestures to our cadaver) came in for a check up?' and someone answered 'We'll i think the abdominal exam would be the least of her worries, she's quite clearly got no lungs...'- The first years have started their semester on Cardiorespiratory fitness you see...
Our demonstrator is very softly spoken and sweet natured. She is training for her exams to become a surgeon and is a proverbial font of knowledge. She finds us very funny, our morbid humour is not above her although never in a million years would she make a lighthearted remark about the dead...
She asked me to find the transversus abdomonis muscle and when i say 'find it', literally, dig away with a knife until it is discovered.
'Dig' perhaps is not the appropriate word because it is actually an incredibly delicate task navigating your way through the skin, fatty tissue layer and fibrous layer to reveal the different muscles of the abdominal region. My friend Sam said he felt physically inferior to the 90 year old man he dissected who could only be described as 'Tonk' or 'Ripped'- a 6 pack to rival the best apparently!
Anyway, the most important thing about me completing this task was not that I found the muscle, but was that I could do it. Slicing an ex-human no longer bothers me!
In fact its got to the point where I need to remember that discussing this weeks anatomy session is not appropriate in a restaurant that sells slow-braised pork resembling human flesh long retired. People LOVE hearing about it, i often get asked 'have you cut up dead people recently?' and its funny to see the response when you reply 'why yes, i spent Thursday morning knee deep in gangrenous intestines'...people have a morbid fascination for these things, but providing a little too much detail is an easy thing to achieve.
I went to the doctors today and was sat in the waiting room reading a book my uncle got me for Christmas-
Was this too far too? Its brilliant, and it was in my bag and my iPod was out of battery. But i did get plenty of funny looks, especially from those closer to the grave than me...(can i say that?!)I was on the bus with my friend Kyle the other day, she was telling me that she had had to iron her lab coat for her exams as it had been shoved in a drawer for Christmas, having been newly washed, and then crumpled. The hot iron brought out the fatty, phenol-y, formaldehyde-y smell and filled her living room with 'essence of Dissection Room'..Gross....
It truly is an original smell, it gets into your hair and wafts around you for many hours. On my way back from the doctors i kept getting drifting whiffs of the exact scent as i was sat on the bus...i couldn't see a medic (post-d.r the buses, filled with anatomically accurate medical students often smell...interesting) or an abandoned lab coat.....
Must have been my mind playing tricks on me.....
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