I was slightly disturbed today by the fact that our second day of anatomy lab felt so normal all of the sudden. Tuesday was met with complete apprehension, anxiety, fear, and wonder, but today, that all seemed washed away under the necessity to complete our dissection (lung removal and finding the neurovascular bundle and interior thoracic artery). For me at least, it was a little easier acting as if this were some monotonous routine–that I had dissected humans before, like our professors; that this was “just another one.”

It’s a great feeling when things start clicking and making sense; understanding everything from lecture to basic anatomical terms. A friend who was not dissecting today noted that it was a little more difficult to see what his partners had done in his absense–as if it was more disturbing and gruesome to have only seen the end result, instead of being present throughout the entire process.

The unanswerable questions interest me the most a lot of the time, and in this case, it’s this: how much of a medical student’s behavior is truly just “normal,” and how much is done out of defense mechanism necessity?

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