My new favorite body part

It's been much too long since I shared my adventures with you all, so here's a synopsis of my last 10 days (I'm hoping to get some sympathetic "aaaw, its ok, now I understand" sentiments.
So last Monday was quiz three, which I studied for like a mad lady since my anatomy grade was a little borderline (the quiz also covered physio, histology, biochem and epidemiology/biostats). Did well on the quiz (yay). Then Friday was our anatomy practical exam where the instructors put little tags all over the cadavers and ask questions like "which nerve innervates this muscle?" "what flows through this vessel?" "if I cut this nerve here, what functions are lost?" etc. (with a few "easy" questions thrown in asking "what's this?"). So I spent all last week prepping for that (about 5 hrs a day in lab... pretty sure I permanently smelled like fermaldahyde last week). This was all in addition to normal classes. All the exams led to a back log of work plus a parental visit on Saturday and a visit to this years OEC class on Sunday. Now I have a little room to breathe and tell you about our dissections over the last week or two :)

Last week we dissected the heart, (we'd already taken the heart out of the chest, now we actually cut open the chambers and looked inside) and I have a new favorite body part. Amazing pictures (not mine) here: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/chordae-tendineae
This is inside your heart. The little strings are called chordae tendineae and they attach to little muscles called papillary muscles. The chordae tendineae attach to your mitral and tricuspid valves in your heart (those are the ones between the atria and the ventricles) and hold the valves shut while the ventricles contract. These pretty little muscles and chords are what makes sure blood flows FORWARD into your lungs/body instead of backwards into the atria/veins. Aren't they gorgeous? Anyhow the heart dissection was pretty much amazing. If you're ever bored, look up pictures of the internal anatomy of the heart and you'll be completely amazed.
Last week we also dissected the posterior mediastinum- think of this as the inside of the back wall of your chest cavity (so if I cut you open from the front, then pulled out your lungs, its the area thats usually behind the lungs). And there, we discovered that Stanley had bone cancer. We'd found one bony nodule/mass on his external ribs, but didn't know what it was. When we found a second nodule, this one internally we asked about it and the docs said its most likely bone cancer. That one was a little eerie for me...
This week we've so far only dissected the abdominal wall, inguinal canal and testes I'll refrain from sharing details to keep the guys from shuddering, other than to say when you dissect out the testis, it really does look like a nut, specifically like a walnut in the shell still.. or maybe an egg (and my roommate says Russian slang calls them eggs...) funny that we use anatomically accurate slang.

We've also started meeting with our physical exam groups. So far we've only worked with taking vitals, which isn't really new for me. I'm not really impressed with our facilitator so far, but my friend (in my group) and I decided we'll give him one more meeting before we talk to the IORs about him. He's very casual and didn't really teach much, which was really hard for the people in our group who had never taken a manual blood pressure or listend to lung sounds (example: I asked "where specifically do we listen to lung sounds?" since this is a point we'll eventually be evaluated on in our practical exams and his answer was "oh you know, 2 or 3 places on the front on each side and 2 or 3 on the back"... no, actually I don't know, that's why I'm here. Oh well...

So now that I've vomited the last 10 days of my life onto the page, I"ll try and post more often... all this writing is a little overwhelming :p

Kaliiiiimaaaaa!!!!!

So this is what we did in anatomy lab today (except it was a little messier and significantly less Evil):

(From Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)

Ok so backing up, this week we're studying the thorax in anatomy. So on tuesday we took off the anterior wall of the thoracic cavity. This involved using trauma scissors/EMT shears to cut the first five ribs. We had to get an instructor with bigger shears to help with Stanley's clavicles (according to the instructor we have "mr burly man cadaver"). Cutting through the ribs was really neat, but the sound is really disturbing. If you've ever heard someone's bone break, you know the sound I'm talking about. Except this is louder (because theres nothing between you and the cracking bone) and you can feel it breaking through the scissors. After taking the wall entirely off, we took out the lungs. The lungs felt like sea cucumbers (remember those from the aquarium touch tidal pool thing?). Still need to make a point of going around the lab to find some smokers for further ammunition to harass all you smokers into quitting. ;)

So then today, we studied the heart. We got as far as clearing away a bunch of fat, identifying the major nerves and vessels around the heart, opening the pericardium and then cutting out the heart. They say your heart should be the size of your fist... Stanley's heart is the size of 3 or 4 of my fists, its HUGE. Its also completely packed with clotted blood (and not gooey flowy blood, this is blood that's turned into a solid. Its like clay), which we have to figure out how to remove on tuesday. Anyway, holding the heart in my hands was pretty damn cool. Also got to see evidence of bypass surgery in a couple of other cadavers (staples and stitches in the heart in one and a wired together sternum in another).

Today we also did surface anatomy, which is basically "ok guys, turns out you don't get to dissect your patients, so now we're teaching you surface land marks to know where the internal stuff is". Today we did lung and diaphragm surface anatomy. So we all took our shirts off and drew lungs and a diaphragm on each other. Nope, I'm not joking. Although we were thankfully warned ahead of time to wear a sports bra or swimsuit top. This was less awkward than I expected since everyone was doing it and everyone seemed a little shy about it. It was also nice to have a female partner :p and it did cross my mind that maybe this is part of why med school has a reputation for being a hook up environment.
During surface anatomy, I discovered I can palpate ribs 2-12 on myself, most people can only feel 2-10 (first rib is under the collar bone). 11 and 12 are usually buried under muscle, but I KNOW I found my 11th (I can get my finger around the tip of it) and I'm pretty sure I found the 12th on my back. If you ask nicely, maybe I'll show you (lol).

In other news... physiology is studying the endocrine system. And biochem is starting to move into some genetics, which makes me very happy :) And doctoring is finally starting some real DOCTOR stuff instead of just epidemiology and biostatistics. We have our first meeting of our physical exam groups next week (so more on that later).

Quiz 3 is on Monday. Wish me luck!