Here is a dog. Have fun.

Our very first anatomy lab was not how I imagined it would be.

Beforehand, we had to pick our group of five that we would be stuck with for the entire year, but we didn't know each other very well so that developed very unfortunately for some people.

On the day of, we all showed up in our lab coats and clutching our lab manuals, hoping one person in our group had managed to get a dissection kit. Our anatomy lab is on the second floor, and there's two entrances as there are two stairways. At this point in time, I didn't know my way around the vet tower very well, and I went up the wrong stairway, so I was actually at the back entrance to the lab. I was getting worried, because out of a hundred people there was no one else waiting there, and only a few showed up behind me. I peeked into the room, but there definitely weren't students in there; I saw a big empty room and some serious-looking faculty talking to each other.

When it was finally time for lab, I crept in, and was relieved to see a massive flood of students coming from the other side of the room.

Now, you may not have thought about this, but to learn anatomy, vet students cut up dead dogs. Your doctors cut up dead people. This is a normal thing, the cadavres take months of preparation and hard work, and they are dogs that would have been euthanised one way or another. There's nothing inhumane about the dissection dogs. You just have to realise that the first thing you see on your first lab is a room of tables with dead dogs lying on their backs, their little paws sticking rigidly up in the air.

Apparently, a few years ago, someone went in after hours to do some review, and brought their non-vet friend with them. This person had never stopped to think about what would actually be in the anatomy lab, and freaked out when she saw the dead dogs. Her reaction? She went straight to the press. I think she thought that the school was covering up this big secret of slaughtering dogs and cutting them up, and they needed to be exposed. At any rate, nothing bad happened, because everything is regulated and has rules and things, but ever since then, no non-vet people are allowed in under any circumstances, and we can't take any pictures.

So here I am, faced with a sea of dead dogs, and we need to pick one that we'll be using for the next year. It's a big, wide room with drains along the floor, metal tables, stools, lots of sinks around the edges, and open windows covering three walls. It's very bright, there are TV monitors all over the room, and it smells like formaldehyde and disinfectant. I actually expected the smell to be much worse, but after enough labs it does start getting to you. Older students had told us to go for the Greyhounds because they have really nice muscles, but I wasn't fast enough to grab one. Since I came in through the back, there were a few skinny ones nearby, so I just picked one that looked sort of ok. I probably didn't make the best choice. For the record, having a fat dissection dog totally sucks. You have to get rid of the fat before you can see anything, and believe me the fat is everywhere.

The next step was to locate the rest of my lab group, who had been scratching their heads over some dogs on the other side of the room, get out the dissection kit, open the lab manuals, and figure out what to do.

This is where we ran into a problem. The faculty must not have been very organised because we didn't get much of a lecture on what to do or how to do it. You see, once we figured out how to get the blade on the scalpel, it was pretty much, "Go!" The lab manual was the only thing telling us what to do, but since we hadn't actually learned anatomy yet, the instructions were pretty much incomprehensible. Here are the first two sentences:

"Make a median ventral incision from the middle of the neck to the xiphoid cartilage. From a point of this incision opposite the brachium, extend a transverse incision to the elbow on one side."

 Good luck.

Looking back, the first few anatomy labs are pretty funny. Our labs now are very involved. This year we've done some insane stuff that is very memorable. Last year, we started out with very, very simple dissections, but at the time it was extremely important and complex to us. We would go really slowly and hesitantly, not sure whether we should cut something or not. The first labs compared to present labs are like cooking ramen noodles compared to Christmas dinner.