Fuzzy Scalpels

I like scalpels, but they gave my anatomy group quite a bit of trouble when we were first starting out.

I wasn't sure how I would feel about dissection, because my high school wasn't very good so I never had the chance to do any. I thought that I might be really creeped out by the dead dogs, or the overpowering smell of preservatives, but as it turns out it's not that creepy and the smell isn't that strong. I was also surprised at how nice handling a scalpel feels.

Sorry if this sounds creepy, but I love cutting with scalpels. It's so smooth! They're really sharp, so they make very nice, efficient cuts, and there's something satisfying about it, like a job well done.

So where does the trouble come in? Here is a picture that I got off google:

You have your metal handle, and the blade snaps on the top (the oblong thing you see in the middle of the blade is part of the handle). You can also see how where the bottom of the blade matches up with the handle, there's a diagonal line.

For starters, we keep putting the blades on backwards. Every time! The pointy part of the diagonal is always facing the wrong way. That's pretty embarrassing by itself, especially since it's been almost a year now. What makes that worse is that we had a very difficult time getting the blade back off at first.

You see, they had these little boxes that served as both a sharps container and an "easy" way to snap the blade off. You're supposed to stick the scalpel into a slot, twist it a bit, and the blade magically pops off. In theory. The first box we tried was so full, we couldn't even get the blade to go into the slot. The next two boxes we tried... well, the blade didn't magically pop off. Every single one of our lab group of five tried to jam it in and twist it around and finagle the blade off, but no one could get it to work. Eventually, we settled with just using forceps to pry the blade off, and hope it doesn't go flying or snap into pieces. I haven't seen the boxes around in a while, so I guess the faculty also decided they sucked and got rid of them.

Just as an ending note, why did I name the site Fuzzy Scalpel? Well the real reason is that I tried putting vet-related words together until I found two that I liked. But! (Warning, this may be a disturbing image for some) The image that came to mind was how when we cut through the skin of our dissection dogs, which are short haired dogs, the fur sticks all over the scalpel. This wouldn't happen in surgery because you shave and sterilise the operation site beforehand.