Gross Anatomy (read at your own risk!)

This semester, I am taking the much anticipated Gross Anatomy class. In case you aren't sure, yes, we do dissect a human (cadaver). This is probably the most interesting thing I have to blog about these days. If you have a weak stomach, you may not want to read all of this. If you enjoy guts and gross stories involving intestines, you'll love this post.

We started off just doing the muscles... pretty boring if you ask me. The only cool part was that it was our first exposure to the cadaver. People kept asking me if I was nervous or scared or freaked out, and my answer was "of course not!" It was a weird feeling knowing that I was about to see a real dead body and I wasn't exactly sure how I would react, but I didn't think it would bother me much and I was right.

So...here's how this works. We are in groups of 4 in the lab and each group has their own cadaver. There are 84 people in my class so that means that we are surrounded by 21 dead bodies during each lab. They are kept in these big metal tanks that are part bathtub part hospital bed. There are levers on each end of the tank that raise the body up out of the "juice" when we are ready to work on it. It takes a steady hand to raise and lower the body without splashing that stuff everywhere. Believe me, you don't want that stuff on you. It stinks and has floating pieces of fat and guts in it!

The most disgusting part of the dissection at first was the fat. Fat is gross! In some places it is kind of hard and "cheesy" and in other places it is really soft and greasy. Either way, it's gross and I find myself not craving much steak these days! We got very lucky with our cadaver because she was not overweight. However, there were some groups that were not so lucky. Some of the cadavers literally had 6 inches of fat or more covering their body and those groups had to cut through it all to do their dissection.

A little background on our cadaver... she was a 68 year old Caucasian female that died of multi-system organ failure. We lovingly refer to her as "Jay-Jay." We decided that "multi-system organ failure" just means that they didn't really know what she died from. When we cut in to her abdomen, it was very obvious why she died. There was a very large mass covering her entire abdominal cavity from side to side and was about 8 inches thick. The professor told us at first that this was her liver and it was very enlarged and just bad. Well, after that, we found her liver, so that mass had to be something else. We thought it might have been her spleen, but we were wrong on that too. It turns out that it was a giant tumor that had engulfed her stomach! We also found a lot of other smaller tumors throughout her abdomen. We had to remove all of the tumors and I swear our tissue bucket weighed 20 pounds when we were done. Because she was so torn up on the inside, all of her organs were sticking to themselves and to the abdominal wall (these are called adhesions and they're not a good thing to have). So, at this point we were supposed to take out the intestines to see the back wall of the abdominal cavity. Since there were so many adhesions, we couldn't take them out and we asked for help from one of our professors. **Gross content warning!** He came over to help us, lifted up part of the intestines, and ripped the adhesions between the intestines and abdominal wall. Poop went everywhere!!!!! It was baby-poopish... green, runny, and smelly! I have to admit, I gagged a little. It's a bad day when your cadaver craps on you...

We moved on to the chest cavity and had to open up her rib cage with a bone saw and some brute force to crack the ribs. We removed her lungs and we think she was a smoker. Lungs are supposed to be shiny and pink and hers were pink with black spots. It was pretty disturbing. After we took out her lungs, we took out her heart. I guess I really never realized how much fat is actually covering your heart. Even on this person that wasn't even overweight there was a significant amount of fat. This class has sort of been a wake up call to take care of my body!

That was really all of the "big" stuff that we did. Since we are dental students, we skip over the naughty bits and limbs and spend extra time on the head and neck. We dissected all of the veins, arteries, and nerves in the neck and that was pretty interesting to see what all is actually in there. It's no wonder you die almost instantly if your neck is sliced.

So this brings us up to the last week or so. On Friday, we just skinned her face and that was somewhat disturbing. We also identified the tiny little muscles in the face and learned that the more you use your face muscles, the more wrinkles you will have. So avoid all facial expressions and you will stay young forever!

Today was probably the coolest day so far. We used the bone saw to cut off the top of her skull and took her brain out! It's really amazing to actually see all of that in person. The brain is a very complex thing and there are so many nerves and vessels. It's really fascinating! Taking off the skull cap (or calvaria for you scholars) was pretty cool too! The bones of your skull are very thick so it's not just me that's hard headed! Haha! Bad joke... Wednesday we are dissecting the eye and the eye socket of the skull and I think I may have to be absent that day. I HATE eyes! They freak me out so, I really do feel like I have a cold coming on. I better stay in bed on Wednesday! :)

I guess that's about it for my update on my most interesting class. If you want to know more gory details just let me know and I'll be happy to share!