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.