Happy Genitalia Week

Warning in advance: this week has been slightly disturbing, and I very much need to get it all out. So the content of this blog might be (will be) slightly (more) disturbing. Here's a list of things I did this week, I'll write about them in this order so if you want to skip something you can (If you'd like to continue thinking of me as a normal human being, I suggest you only read #5).

1. On Monday we had our male GU lecture- so we looked at normal and abnormal penises for an hour

2. On Tuesday we dissected the anal triangle (yes, its pretty much what it sounds like)

3. On Wednesday, I did my first rectal and male GU exam and had a lecture on pelvic and breast exams

4. Today we hemisected our cadaver's pelvis (cut it straight into right and left halves) and removed the right leg from the body (with a hammer and chisel).

5. Tomorrow is my roommie's birthday (guess what we'll be consuming large quantities of after a week like that?)

1. So Monday actually wasn't that bad. It's just that anything male is very un-intuitive for me (being female...). Fun fact of the day: men have a tiny little vestigial homolog to the uterus. (translation for non-science folks: guys have a little tiny womb inside of them. No, it doesn't work.) And women have a homolog to the penis which has some function (sort of...) I'll let you figure out what it is and what it's function is ;-) if you're stumped, you can ask me. And a fabulous direct quote from our anatomy instructor "The pudendal nerve provides sensory innervation to the penis or the clitoris. It also provides motor innervation to the voluntary sphincters of the urethra and the anus. So it's kind of important, you should try not to cut it in surgery" (Translation: One nerve lets you feel your penis/clit AND keeps you from pissing and crapping your pants. It's just a little important)

2. The anal triangle is the space between your ishial tuberosities (if you sit up nice and straight, they're the bones that poke down into the floor) and your asshole. We started this dissection by putting an excessively large tampon up our cadavers ass (my job since my lab partners literally couldn't do it). Which was somewhere beyond disturbing. Then we spent 3 hrs digging through the fat around the ass looking for nerves. Disgusting and unrewarding.

3. So doing an exam (on a practice patient who gets paid... not on my classmates) wasn't as rough as I expected. It's like there's a switch I can flip in my head that turns off the part of your brain that recognizes what you're really doing and just focuses on learning and doing it right. I think the most disconcerting part of the exam for me wasn't actually the rectal exam. It was the inguinal canal exam (checking for an inguinal hernia)... you can google it if you want to know whats involved. anyways, it was disturbing because to me, it really looks like it should hurt (but apparently it doesn't really?). Made me realize I don't really have a good understanding of man-parts and what is and isn't painful

In order to let you all still consider me a semi-normal human being, I'll stop describing this :)

Pelvic and breast lectures were a lot of "yeah yeah I've heard all that before", but apparently a lot of it went over the guys' heads. (The guy next to me didn't know what a cervix was for example, he definitely asked me in the middle of lecture). They also clearly didn't know what to do with the speculums they were passing around.

4. So today's lab was quite brutal. we've gone entirely through the abdomen and pelvis so today we literally took a chisel and hammer and cut straight through L4 and L5 vertebrae and the sacrum, then used a scalpel to extend the cut from the spine horizontally through the posterior wall (aka the cadaver's right lower back). Then we cut straight through the genitalia (yeah, go ahead and shudder at the thought of cutting personal parts in half. It made me shudder). And here's the best part: Stanley's bowels and rectum are really really really full (of poop). So we were having a hard time completing the cut to remove his right leg without cutting his bowels open. So we called over an instructor to help.

Instructor: well, you aren't cutting along the midline, you're too far off to the side

Me: well, his rectum is really full, and we really don't want to perforate it.

Instructor: It is really full, you just have to pull it off to the side like this [pulls].... and I just stuck my finger through his rectal wall, sorry guys, that's poop on my gloves.

[uuuuuuuuuugh]

so according to the instructor, our rectum was so very very full, that rupturing it was basically inevitable. In the end, she actually removed the entire thing which will make future dissections easier. So not the happiest day in lab. It smelled horrible, and it was rather violent. Seeing the sagital section (from the midline cut) of the male pelvis/genitalia wasn't that exciting, the female was pretty cool though, even if the ovaries and uterus are all shrunken in the few old ladies who haven't had a hysterectomy by the time they donate their bodies.

5. So party tomorrow :) One day to relax before we gear up for an exam on Monday, an anatomy practical on Friday and a visit to the "pelvic exam simulator" so we can all practice our pelvic exams on plastic lady parts before we see a real patient in two weeks.... shit just got real :-)