Sorry, Walter, This Might Hurt a Little

Another week of medical school in the books. I swear, some days are awesome and others just humble you; so it has been for another week. Once more I stare at an approaching weekend with little more than studying, doing laundry, and catching up on sleep on my list of things to do.

Another week in the books. The gloves are off, now. I am still running on adrenaline: staying up until midnight or 12:30 studying and getting up at 5:15 or 5:30 to, surprise, do more studying. I'm starting to feel a little run down. Guess that's part of what I signed up for, isn't it?

Classes were good. This week, we practiced doing a patient interview and taking a patient history which was pretty damned hard. Seriously, how the hell do you meet someone, figure out why they're seeing the doctor, get more information about their "chief complaint," take a medical history, make a diagnosis, and form a plan of attack in about fifteen minutes? Pretty tough to do. I have a great respect for those folks who make it look easy.

Anywho, I'm still struggling to keep up with the reading and make sense of everything covered in class. It's a battle that I don't imagine will end soon. At the very least, I hope to get used to the discomfort of it all.

My First (Human) Dissection
Today was our first dissection in anatomy lab. All day long, everyone was buzzing with excitement. Some were really looking forward to it, others were cautiously excited about it, and still others were pretty apprehensive. Prior to lab, we had to watch a video specifically about removing skin. Funny, when I mentioned wanted to hear "The Killing Moon" and made vague references to "putting the lotion in the basket," people didn't seem to know that I was talking about. It's a cultivated sense of humor, I suppose.

As the time neared for lab though, the joking seemed to dissipate and everyone got a little more serious. Our tasks for the day were to get to lab, flip our body onto the stomach, skin the back, and dissect some of the superficial muscles. Seriously, think about this for a moment: we were tasked with skinning a human back. Not really something that you do every day.

I grabbed a lab coat and joined my team at the dissection table. Everyone was really amped. I mentioned that I'd like to call the cadaver Walter and explained that, to me, he really looked like a Walter. One of my teammates confessed that, she too, had been thinking of the name Walter for him. I thought it was a little uncanny that we'd both thought the same thing but it was settled; we'd be working on Walter.

Our first task was to remove Walter from the body bad that we'd put him in the prior week and roll him over. Prior to doing this, though, we put some socks on his hands and feet and sprayed them with a moistening solution to prevent them from drying out too badly. Then, we need to put a wet cloth on his face and plastic bag over his head for the same reason.

As we're working on his hands and feet, I guess that we shook him a little. While I was staring right into Walter's lifeless eyes, the top of his skull pulled off to reveal that his brain had been removed. Immediately, I felt myself flush and felt beads of sweat on my forehead and upper lip.

"Why's it so hot in here?," I asked. "Seriously, are you guys hot?, " I asked, feeling a little lightheaded. "I'm really hot." Afraid that I would soon hit the floor, I tore myself away from Walter's vacant stare, replace the top of his head, took several deep breaths, and tried to think of something else. Within a few moments, I felt fine; crisis averted. In retrospect, I think that getting really freaked out and almost hitting the deck is pretty normal when staring into someone's eyes and their head comes apart. Hell, you're just not supposed to see that, you know?

With the help of a few other folks, we turned Walter onto his belly and worked a prop under his neck so that he wouldn't be laying on his face. Then, it was time to cut. Everyone else in our group was a little tentative about making the first incision, so I readily volunteered. Our job was to make a series of incisions in order to remove the skin from the back and get access to the musculature.

A guide to making incisions
from our dissection manual.

I thanked Walter for his gift to us, apologized to him, plunged the scalpel into the base of his skull and cut a line from his neck to his ass crack. Then, I carved around the top of this glutes, up to his armpits, down his arms and, finally, back up to his neck where we started. I must say, it's a pretty damned unnatural thing to do.

During the skinning, I felt like I was the king of the "finger hole," a technique that allows you to put a good bit on tension on a piece of epidermis that's being removed. Again, in any other context, it would be quite disturbing to think about but, hey, it's what goes on in lab. Finally, we got the skin off of his back and attempted to remove additional fatty tissue in order to get down to the superficial muscles. All the while, we kept pitching parts of Walter into a bin. During the semester, all parts of a cadaver are kept together so that, when the dissection is complete, the remains will be cremated and returned to the family. In all likelihood, I probably won't be eating steak for the near future (or, for that matter, visiting my local butcher).

Behold: the "finger hole."

After an eternity, we finally removed enough tissue to clearly identify the superficial muscles. We saw his atrophied trapezius muscles, his latissimus dorsi, his rhomboids, and a slew of nerves and arteries. It was pretty damned cool, I must say. During the dissection, I was trying to get a piece of fatty tissue off of the back when it tore loose and flew straight into my eye and onto my face.

Afterward, my fingers were tingling from the formaldehyde (through the gloves); my clothes stank of it. No matter how much I washed, I couldn't seem to get the smell off of me. I guess we're bonded now, Walter and me. BFFs or at least until the course ends and he goes home to his family after completing one final awesome deed.