Heart dissection.

Today we dissected our cadaver's heart. It was amazingly neat; I've always been a fan of cardiopulmonary stuff, and I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday's lung dissection, but I was really looking forward to doing the heart. It took a while to remove the organ from the abdominal cavity. After about an hour and a half of clearing away tissue, trying to preserve important structures (like the vagus nerve, which we accidentally severed in out excitement to hack away at the aorta), we dislodged the organ and passed it around. So cool! Granted, a preserved heart doesn't look exactly like a beating one, but it was still a wild moment. After getting our oohs and ahhhs out (none of the other groups seemed nearly as excited as we were), we started making incisions into each of the chambers to observe the walls, valves, etc. We ran out of time to complete the dissection, but will finish it up later this week.

As I said earlier, cadaver dissection really hasn't been too traumatic; we've christened ourselves "Team Awesome" (my idea) and named our cadaver Gertrude ("Grandma Gertie" when we're feeling affectionate), and my groupmates are pretty chill compared to some of the crazy surgery wannabees who hog the other dissections. We found out that our cadaver died from colon cancer and "failure to thrive," and I subtly impressed one of the instructors by locating a colectomy site on the cadaver's abdomen (okay, so it was kind of obvious, but my other group members thought it was her belly button...). It'll be interesting to see what her abdomen looks like, knowing that she must have had at least one surgery, possibly to remove necrotic tissue. One the downside, it means that her anatomy may not be the best for learning normal structures, but I guess we can always hover around another group's table when we get to that point.

Other than that, the lecture workload has eased up some, but I think that's mostly because I've gotten used to it, not because we're getting less material. I'm still up most nights until midnight or 1 am, looking over the day's lectures and pre-reading the next day's material, as well as working on long-term assignments for my medical literature and doctoring 101 class, but I've adjusted my sleep schedule (and caffeine intake) accordingly. Getting up in the morning for class is rather difficult, as my body could usually use another 2-3 hours of sleep to feel well-rested, but I guess that's what weekends are for, right? Actually, I spent most of last weekend tucked away in the library, and with my first exam fast approaching (next Friday, yikes!), I expect to repeat that same schedule this weekend.

It's hard to believe I'm in the second week already. Time flies when you're busy, though sometimes it feels like I've been in this study mode for much longer than nine days. Oh well...must keep chugging away, I suppose.