WILTIMS #28: “Ooo, look at this! Isn't this awesome?!”

Let's get this out of the way right now:

TIL: To remove a champagne glass from the rectum, you can fill the glass with plaster of Paris and a tongue depressor. After relaxing the anal sphincter and allowing the plaster to set, you can pull the glass out without breaking it. The more you know!

Today was awesome. Disturbing at times (see above), but one of the most inspiring days to date.

We started the day with an anatomy lecture on the urogenital diaphragm and the female perineum. We then dissected the same up in lab, which was not easy. This was one of those lessons for which the takeaway was that we can't really see any of the important structures, but we still need to know them. Also, cadavers do not assume the spread eagle position with ease, so we had to use wood blocks to brace the legs apart. Not exactly a tasteful position...

Today was also the first time we had to flip our cadaver! The only noteworthy thing about this is that the entire posterior surface of the body had filled with fluid and flattened against the metal table. When we first flipped our body, it was flat as a board from the thighs to the shoulders, except at certain intervals where the skin bunched up, like a poorly ironed shirt. After an hour or so, some of the curves of the skin returned, but it still looked rather boxy.

The highlight of the day was an extracurricular activity for which some members of my class volunteered to introduce students from the speech/pathology school on campus to the anatomy lab and our bodies. These students will be taking gross anatomy in January, but are typically totally new to hard sciences and lab classes, so to them, even with only a month of experience, we are the experts. This was the first time we were able to show off what we had already learned, while trying to de-scarify (that's a technical term) the idea of working with cadavers.

I had the bonus of getting to explore a new body because we had more than one student from our group and the adjacent body had no one. This made it so that I could explore the body right along with the speech/pathology students, and be genuinely enthusiastic when we discovered peculiar anatomy or pathology. I had a blast with this and really surprised myself as to how much I have already learned.