A pluck, an aneurysm, and a female reproductive system walk into a bar...

This entry was from sometime in early December, 2008

Over the past month as the semester winds down to a close, Kevin has shown us some of the lab specimens he's obtained from various cadavers he's had the opportunity to work on in the prosectorium. All of the specimens are fascinating, and yet outside of the human body in their proper spaces they look alien and somewhat ghastly.

He has shown us so far, a pluck (tongue, larynx, pharynx, trachea, bronchii, lungs), an aortic aneurysm, a spinal cord ending at the cauda equina, and a female reproductive system, with both ovaries, uterine tubes, uterus, vagina, and labia majora. The reproductive system was what made my mind race the most, since our reproductive organs, in a sense, give us our biggest source of identity.

Did the uterus he held up ever bear children? I started to imagine what my own uterus looked like in comparison. Mine saw seven pregnancies, but only saw two come to term. My medical chart would read: Gravida 7, Para 2. The ovaries, much as mine must be now, were scarred from years of ovulating. My head was swimming with so many odd comparison thoughts that I had to step back, take a deep breath and stretch, and then resume the viewing.

The pluck he showed us during the respiratory system lecture was an odd sight. The tongue at the top was ridden with papillae and was a gray, hardened oddity. It was not the shiny, flexible pink mass we see in our mouths every time we yawn, eat, or brush our teeth. My classmate Elizabeth, the squeam(ish) queen, as one of my other classmates liked to call her, could not contain the audible "Ewww!" when Kevin held it up for all to see. I, on the other hand, was fascinated at the entire specimen. To see them all attached, and not in the stylized manner you see in a colored rendition in an anatomy book, was riveting.

I will be sad when this semester ends. I look forward to next semester, when I will be in Kevin's Bio232 class, and I feel that it will not only give me a wider breadth of understanding of the human body, but it will also be an invaluable tool for me to get through Dr. Dan Trubovitz's Bio230 class.

I feel bad for Kevin though. He has to put up with me again for another semester.

The Prosectorium

Original entry date: January 28, 2008

I'm in the Biology 230 class of Dr. Dan Trubovitz, at San Diego Miramar College. I enrolled in this class as part of the five prerequisite classes needed in order to fulfill the requirement for a baccalaureate program in the field of Nursing Science. In the winter of 2006 I took Chemistry 100 + lab, in the spring of 2007 I took Biology 107, in the winter of 2007 I took Biology 205 (general microbiology), and now I am in Biology 230, otherwise known as Human Anatomy. The only science I need after this for my core sciences would be Biology 235, which is generally known as Human Physiology.

Why Anatomy and Physiology are taught separately in the lower college divisions, confuses me.

The idiot bitch whom I caught passing notes about me in Bio107 is in this class, and she refuses to look at me. I would refuse to look at me as well if I left a note full of trash talk on the floor by the lab table right where the subject matter could easily see it, and then get chewed out for it once it was discovered. I spared her no mercy when I told her that as an adult, as a college student, and most importantly as a future nurse, she shouldn't be prejudging people by the color of their skin (which is what the note was about... one of my rare encounters with racism in America). She cried and later apologized. But now she sits here, one table away from me, and huddles in her corner away from my glances back towards her.

Dr. Trubovitz (whom I will hereforth refer to simply as Dan) went over the introduction to anatomy. What does anatomy mean? What are cells? What are cell systems? What are tissues? What are systems? I try to keep interested in class, and I took furious notes, even though I know the subject matter and remain one of the few people in the room who can confidently answer his questions regarding the very basics of organ systems.

He announces that we are dissecting rats, and we are to point out basic structures within the rats. Find the lungs, heart, liver, stomach, intestines, spleen, kidneys, and find several types of tissues associated with the structures. Mesentery proper, greater omentum, lesser omentum. The names are strange, yet familiar, and all my prior knowledge of the subject starts to wake from a long and deep slumber.

Some of the people in there who raised their hand and said that they were in the class to fulfill their prereq for nursing (sound familiar?) got squeamish and refused to touch the rat. One of the girls said that looking at dead things and their squishy organs grossed her out. She said that she wanted to work as an ICU nurse. Good luck with that sister.

After we cleaned up from our first day dissection, Dan took us into the prosectorium to look at the cadavers. Miramar is blessed with a good program (for a state community college) that allows students access to cadavers from a joint program with UCSD. Currently there are three cadavers in the back. Dan opens the door, invites us all to don gloves, and then goes towards the body at the end of the room and begins unzipping the body bag.

Students mill around, some look mortified at the prospect of being near a dead body. Some choose not to go into the room. I am at the front and center, gloves on and ready, and he removes the wrappings from the cadaver and begins to show us the body.

The cadaver is large. In life the man must have been about 6'1". He is lean, and the color of his flesh is rendered a weird shade of yellow-brown as a result of the embalming process. He has a visible pacemaker, and he was dissected enough so that we could look at his entire thoracic and abdominopelvic cavity. Dan passed around his heart for all of us to hold; it was a large, stiff mass of muscle, with white rubbery tubes that were the aorta and vena cava. The man was born in December 1919, and died in June of 2004 of congestive heart failure.

Five minutes later we left the room. I'm so weirded out from holding a man's heart in my hands, of seeing a cadaver that up close and personal, and the smell of the formalin lingers in my nostrils and throat. I have so many questions going on in my head that I can't even really think straight right now.

All I know is that lunch is out of the question.