WILTIMS #12: Pass the bone saw!

After my first real weekend (o, sweet respite!), it's back to the trenches. The second years have all returned and I even played a pick-up flag football game with some of them. Alas, our weekend was not all fun and games. The first years were all required to attend a CPR/BLS course that took most of Sunday. Relatively painless, if a bit tedious. The highlight was the mass-beating of babies - which in context was totally socially acceptable as a demonstration of how to dislodge an object from a choking infant.

This morning we had our most intensive anatomy lab yet. Normally, each body is shared by two groups of four students, each of which dissects one half of the body in turn. For labs in which we must work on one of the body's unilateral structures, like the heart and brain, we instead join with the other group and work together. Today we removed the anterior rib cage (the front of the chest) to expose the chest cavity. We then removed the lungs and made a window to the heart within its pericardial membrane.

Rib shears.

Opening the chest was weird and awesome and did I mention weird? We snapped the ribs one by one with a tool that looks like a cross between plant shears and scissors. They make a crispy crunchy sound not unlike ripping apart a dry tree branch. We then used a bone saw to cut through the manubrium and inferior sternum (respectively, the top and bottom of the breast bone). After using any and every tool we could find to clean up the cuts, we finally removed the rib cage. Twas satisfying.

Later in the day we had another lecture by a career surgeon. His lectures are usually light on required information and heavy on amusing anecdotes. We learned how to auscultate (listen (why do we need all these fancy words again?)) to heart murmurs from the various valves. On Friday, I believe we will be practicing this ourselves.

Finally, this evening I went into the anatomy lab after hours for the first time. It's really nice having around the clock access to the cadavers, not that I plan on communing with them alone in the wee hours of the morning...

TIL: My hands may never stop smelling like dead people.