In medical school, it is one of your major subjects in your freshman year which will then should come in handy as you go through deeper and deeper into studying medicine. Anatomy is not for the faint heart because you will encounter a corpse of a real human being called as cadavers. Cadavers are preserved human body commonly from the morgue of the hospitals. I believe these are unclaimed dead bodies which are either sold or donated to the medical school from their partner hospital.
As I enrolled to my anatomy class, I fully conditioned myself for the cadaver dissection. This way I will not be stunned and shocked by the things that I will about to see during the entire semester. I prepared myself that what I will see is an actual human body (dead) and I have to get through this if I want to become a doctor and a surgeon someday. Days before the actual class, I can't help but to feel really excited to see, touch and dissect a human body. It feels like you are one step closer to your goal. On our first day, we are just asked to bring the necessary materials required for this class like scrubs, face mask, surgical cap, hand gloves and of course our dissecting kit.
Comes the day of the dissection, the cadavers are in one big room side by side in their own dissection table inside a black body bag. The room is kind of cold of it's just me feeling that I am in a room full of dead human bodies. Each cadaver accommodates ten students (this really depends on your class size) for dissection.
We begin to unzip their bags and I can't help but get more excited. At first, I avoid looking at the face because I think this is where I would be creep out but it can't be avoided so it's something I just learned to deal with over the next few minutes. Of course, the texture of the skin is already a bit dry and the smell really is hard to endure (at first) since it is full of formalin to preserve the body long enough for the whole semester to finish. Most of the cadavers are males since the breast part of the female cadavers are full of fats which will need to be removed to get a full view of the internal organs. In my experience, there's at least one female cadaver in the room reserved for studying the female reproductive organs.
Before every dissection, we begin by saying a short prayer for the cadaver to say thank you for letting him/her be an instrument for us to study the wonders of the human body. It is also important to pay respect to the body and avoid playing with it and goofing around it while doing dissection. Since our topic that day focuses on the back bone, of course we have to flip the cadaver! The cadaver assigned to our group is a big man therefore he is heavy it is my first time to actually touch a cadaver and we have to lift him and flip it. All of the body juices and formalin started to leak and can't help but feel it in my hands even I'm wearing gloves. The smell became stronger and stinky to the eyes. Well it comes with the job.
The dissection begins and it is somehow scary to do the cut because it is your first time to almost everything that's happening around you but we pushed through. It is quite enjoyable and I'm sure all of the med student aspirants out there would understand and agree to me about this. It is a wonderful experience really and I never thought that dissecting can be that tiring. You really need to make efforts to learn in anatomy and also be careful in everything that your scalpel cut into as it may be an important vein or nerve that is necessary later on.
Afterwards, everything should be back in place and cadavers should be zipped again to their respective body bags 'til the next anatomy class.
On my next blog about anatomy, I will share my experience while taking practical exams which is a timed exam and a moving exam at the same time. It's fun but nerve-racking.
What's your first cadaver encounter and dissection like? Feel free to comment below.
