I don’t know who these guys are , but posting a practical joke involving a cadaver with a full view of the face is incredibly unprofessional. As a former anatomy TA, I know I’ve had my share of laughs in the dissecting lab, but it was among classmates in a closed setting, not posted on the Internet for all to see.

If that was my father, brother, or friend, I think I’d be pretty pissed. Those that donate their bodies give us the privelege of using them to learn, not for the whole world to see us play around with.

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Michael Paulus’s gallery of cartoon character skeletons is not to be missed.

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Note : do not read this whilst eating, thinking about eating, or just having eaten.

This was, by far, the most disgusting week of medical school, and Monday may just be the most disgusting day of my life. I’m not ready to proclaim this until I’ve been through the hell that is residency, but it’s gotta be top 5 at least.

Monday we started off with our intestinal tapeworms and nematodes (roundworms/helminths) GI lecture. This included whipworm , which causes, OHMYFREAKINGGOD, rectal prolapse (don’t click that!). We also learned about all the other fun ones, including ascaris (I wouldn’t click that one either), which can lay 200,000 eggs every day inside your stomach.

So that’s always a pleasant talk, I’m sure. Next, since I’m an anatomy TA, and we’re starting the pelvis, we have to pre-dissect the bodies for the students. This involves separating the abdomen from the pelvis and legs, and then hemi-section–separating each egg, by cutting down the middle. Along with vessels and nerves and muscles, you have to tie off the large intestine and cut it, so you can separate the top from the bottom. When you die, unfortunately your poop doesn’t magically disappear. It says right in the body. And, say, if you’ve never done this whole “hemi-secting” thing before, and you and your friend are sawing through a hip bone, you might just accidentally saw through a bit of bowel.

Yes, Monday not only did I see prolapsed rectums, but I got to clean a ton of shit out of a dead person’s rectum. This was, by far, the most traumatizing thing in medical school. We hit the bowel in two places, so we had to basically remove all the feces from the body and throw it away. No, they do not pay us enough.

And then, to wrap things up, for our GI test on Monday, I was studying Hirschsprung’s disease . This keeps you from pooping, because some of your nerve cells don’t make it down all the way to the end of your intestines, so feces can build up. I also learned, according to a review book, that the poop can build up so much… that you poop out your mouth. There’s a South Park episode where this happens, but it’s just that much grosser that it actually does.

And yes, I’m paying $50,000 a year for this wonderful life.

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I was going to be sarcastic and snarky and critical in an attempt to be funny, but I don’t think it’d work.

These elementary school drawings of human anatomy are surprisingly good. You’ve got muscles attached to bones, a simplified arterial and venous circulation (the renal veins are in front of the arteries, Sarah, and I hope that’s not blood in the ureters), and a nice little kidney (renal pelvis is a bit off).

Okay, so I was still critical. I’m sure they’re better than I could’ve done at their age.

Not much worse than the first year medical students!

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All of us Anatomy TAs were freaking out yesterday, excited to see a situs inverus cadaver . (Situs inversus occurs when all your organs are flipped to the opposite side. So your heart’s on the right, your liver’s on the left, etc.) I was helping people dissect yesterday when I saw one of the team’s bodies where the apex of the heart was pointing toward the *right*. First I thought, “Did they detach the heart and flip it around? But it was firmly stuck in there. I started to get excited, thinking it had to be situs inversus, so I felt down toward the *left* side of the diaphragm, and felt the liver. There it was!

I called the professor over to confirm it, and he agreed–it was the first case he had ever seen. Very exciting. The whole lab swarmed to check it out, and I called the other TAs over to see it. Absolutely fascinating. I can’t wait to see the abdomen.

Situs inversus is a 1/10,000 occurrence, and some believe it occurs due to a mutant cilia protein that causes the cilia to beat in the opposite direction. This then pushes developmental proteins in the fetus to the opposite side, and voila, mirror image.

Unfortunately for the dissecting students, they’re going to be *totally* confused. I told them to make sure they primarily study different bodies… otherwise, they’ll be totally lost.

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Ours looked like he was merely sleeping. Laura’s looked like a cranky baby; Sarah’s had a flat, crooked nose, and Steve’s must’ve had surgery, seeing as though there were sutures under the sutures . Just trying to recall the initial feeling gives me a shiver as I write. We each removed the off-white elastic cloths from their heads, after deliberation and guidance from our partners. Some debated over who should do the pulling; others were non-chalant. Over the back of the head first, or over the face, and get it over with? Fast or slow?

If nothing else in anatomy felt like sacred, corporeal ground, this most certainly did. It wasn’t just that after 4 months we finally saw our cadavers’ faces, but that we were about to cut the nerves of their head and remove their brains. Maybe it was partially the shock of returning to the anatomy labs after an intense final and 3 week break, but it sure felt like more than that. Becky, my dissection partner, warned me if she started either laughing or crying I shouldn’t freak out, just as I was about to say the same back to her.

The brain’s different. Or at least, we’re taught to think that way. You cut out a liver and rotate it around 360 degrees and there’s not much of a human attachment to it, besides the obvious fact it used to be attached to a human. A small intestine is a small intestine is a small intestine. It doesn’t make you who you are–physically or mentally. Same with a thoracic duct, an aorta, a tendon in the foot, or a ligament in the knee. But the brain… the brain is everything . It’s thoughts, it’s emotions, it’s personality. It’s language. It’s love, it’s hate, it makes us human . It makes us alive, or it makes us dead. It’s responsible for the most beautiful art and music the world has ever known, and it’s responsible for the most atrocious, vile wars and massacres. Mozart had one, but it really wasn’t that much different from Hitler’s.

It’s a weird feeling. Here you are, staring at, pretty much, a head and neck face-down, dead for months (and possibly years), with most of the rest of the body dissected, and the pelvis and lower limbs completely detached, laying at the other end of the table. But you can’t help but think, “Once I do this, once I remove the brain , there’s no going back. This person will be dead forever.” You tell yourself that you also need a liver to live, as well as a heart and every other organ you’ve obliterated in the name of science, medicine, and the health of your future patients, but the brain still gives you pause, at the top of the hierarchy.

As our instructor demonstarted the removal technique (which I thoroughly botched), my shoulders tensed and my face grimaced as he cut the cranial nerves . First the olfactory–there goes smell. Then the optic–no more vision. Then it was to the spinal cord and brainstem; with a snip of the scissors, it was severed. To get a better angle, he put the head on a wooden block. It seemed like manhandling, and the nervous looks of my classmates seemed to agree.

Back at our own dissecting table, I took a break while Becky was working to force myself to look down at my cadaver’s face. While “resemble” is too exact of a word, his face seemed to have some features that reminded me of an old boss back when I was in high school. And I looked at the other faces in the bay, wondering who the person was. “She was definitely a fun grandma.” “I wonder if he was peaceful when he died.” “She looks like a teacher.”

I think I’ve come to finally understand why donating one’s body to science is such a gift. It’s such a private matter to give someone access to your body in life or death, but to give us access to a brain seems almost like an intrusion on our part. It’s such a personal area. It’s where our memories are kept, where our secrets are locked, and where our lives are lived. To give some 23-year-old kid like me even symbolic access to all that, and to have him then try to understand who you were seems like the ultimate in vulnerability.

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Been too busy and concurrently lazy to post lately, but I figured I’d give a couple updates and lessons I’ve learned:

* If you think it’s a cervix, it’s probably an ejaculatory duct. We had an anatomy walkabout (where they pin different things and we have to ID them) on the abdomen and the pelvis, and, yet again, I made a stupid mistake. Maybe it was from the lack of sleep. Maybe I’m just an idiot. Now maybe this is me setting my standards too high, but I think if they pin the ejaculatory duct, I should reasonably be able to tell that the answer “cervix” probably ain’t right. Especially when there’s a penis right there on the body. Urology, proctology, and ob/gyn have just been ruled out.

* The medical community is not telling you the truth about your amniotic fluid. When you take health class, or ever talk about pregnancy in class, the amniotic fluid is just this vague fluid that somehow develops to cushion the infant. It’s just kind of there, and you don’t generally ask what it is, or how it got there. And now I know why. Y’see, the amniotic fluid is basically, uh, fetal pee. It’s quite a beautiful cycle. You drink your pee, pee it out, bathe in it, and drink it again. No, really. If you’re really all that curious, there’s much more information about it , but really, ignorance is, without a doubt, bliss.

* It’s all about who you know. I just got a job working with the Virtual Labs Project , and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ll be doing some Flash animations and slowly learning how everything works, but I ended up finding out about the position from an older med student who saw my website and thought I had potential. Sniff. I’ll try not to get too emotional. Thanks, Phil .

* Damn. The body is amazing. Glad to report that my sense of wonder continues to develop. Just going over heart sounds on Friday, I was reminded at how mind-boggling it is that all these complicated things are happening, every beat, in the body. Muscles squeeze, valves fly open or snap shut, pressures rise and fall… and it all happens so naturally and quickly that to begin to understand it, you have to really slow down the process in your head. But then, you realize that the dynamics change so quickly that it’s almost impossible to follow the process real-time in your mind. Although your heart has no problem pumping, without stopping, for 76 years. I won’t even being to talk about its development, save for a quote from a Embryology professor: “It’s as if you had to make a cruise-liner engine from a tiny speedboat motor, in the course of 9 months, the only other stipulation being that you’re never allowed to stop the engine from running.”

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Seeing as though two out of three of my anatomy lecturers are British, I swear I’m going to run into pronunciation problems. It’s not capillary, it’s caPILLary; it’s not trachea, it’s traCHEA. UmbilICUS, not umbilicus, too.

I’m kind of scared I’m going to break into a British accent every time I try discussing anatomy with someone.

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There’s a yearly Halloween Skit/Pumpkin Carving Contest in Anatomy, and our dissection table clenched the title this year along with another group. The prize? A dinner cooked by the professors. Ooh la la.

Since it helped us clinch the title, I thought I’d post the song lyrics I wrote, sang, and played on the guitar today. To the tune of U2’s classic, Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (explanation: John Dolph works in the anatomy lab and is notorious at instantly finding things that you have no idea how to locate):

I’ve reflected, I have probed
I have searched my frontal lobe
Only to see through you
Only to see through you

I’ve tried bluntly,
I’ve tried sharp,
Looked around your meta carp
Only to flex you
Just minimi and you

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

There’s your ASIS, on your hips
And profundus, in your fingertips
These words I acquire
This burning desire

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

I believe knowledge will come
But where are you, infundibulum?
Infundibulum!
Yes I’m still searchin’

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
Oh John Dolph, I haven’t found, what I’m lookin’ for…

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I’m losing body parts faster than I can find new ones. Faster than Marty McFly . Fast. And furious. It’s not that they’re going anywhere on the physical plane, but their common names are starting to sound less familiar by the day. I’m beginning to think my brain’s gotten the go-ahead signal to start deleting information, no matter if I like it or not. Personally, I think getting rid of the lyrics to Groove Is In The Heart or the theme to Captain Planet might be wiser places to start the neural trimming, but I guess you don’t really get a say.

My shoulder’s way gone. Has been for awhile. Hands and fingers are falling apart quickly, too. Maybe this is just because I’m a med student, but now that I’m learning every part of the human body, I’m kinda pissed I was never taught it before. It makes you appreciate your body a lot more. Or it does for me, at least. I used to always think of my shoulder as, well, a shoulder. Y’know–the rounded-off area between your neck and your arm? It always had a definite shape (“shoulder-shaped”), it was fairly solid, and, although it never had any specific boundaries, I kind of had an idea of where my shoulder started and ended. Turns out, I was completely wrong.

It’s not really a body part to me anymore. It probably will never be one to me again. It’s a collection of bones and muscles and tendons and ligaments that are shaped in a certain way. That notch on the top? Used to be the defining palpable area that I’d call my shoulder. Turns out, it’s the acromion of your scapula . I know! Who knew? Follow it down, that bony part–it’s more scapula. And around the front? Scapula. Clavicle. It’s hard to convey the feeling or the contrast. Of course I knew we had bones, but now, I know exactly where they are. My shoulder’s not a shoulder. It’s a scapula. With muscle all over it.

It’s the same with muscles. I knew we had muscles, but now, I know exactly what they do . It’s a bizarre feeling trying to examine yourself, figure out where your muscles are, and what’s making what move. It’s so natural, so thoughtless, that even trying to think what muscles are moving seems forced and out of place. It’s as if I’m somehow surprised that we don’t have to will our muscles to move. Triceps, medial, lateral, and long heads, contract! Extensors digitorum, go! Opponens policis, flex!

In other news, it looks like we have have discovered some new male birth control and new fertility drugs . Marijuana makes sperm lazy and burn out too quickly, and caffeine makes them more active. Imagine that.

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