Tuesday 10 May 2011

Things That Are Creepy to Dissect

Warning: this is more graphic than most posts, and I don't recommend reading it if you get creeped out by mental images.

That being said, here are some of the things that I found disconcerting or downright creepy, as well as a few that I was expecting to be worse than they were.

Paw Pad: In the first semester, we navigated our way through the many muscles of the body, and for a long time nothing we did was at all disturbing. I may have even been a little disappointed, because I was expecting anatomy lab to be a bit crazier (it has since met my expectations this year). Even removing the skin didn't feel very weird. It was all good and fun, until we got to the paw. I'm not sure if I can explain why it was so, but there seemed to be unanimous agreement that removing the paw pad was uncomfortable. You might be able to conjure up the same feeling if you look at the nearest furry animal, and picture their thick, callous paw pad alone on a table, cold, attached to some preserved skin.

Eyelid: If you see below, the eye was cool. What was weird was the surrounding skin that was left behind, including the eyelids and lashes. Getting the eye out was super awkward, and since we had to cut everything out, in the end we were left with the ring of skin, which like I said was weird to look at by itself, so I put it back over the socket. That was a bit creepy. Imagine looking into a dog face, with its eyelids open, and an empty socket behind them.

Tongue: Mostly because the dog is dead and preserved, I don't like touching her tongue. We didn't dissect it or anything, though it did come out attached to the larynx (the Adam's Apple area) when we were looking at that. Normally dog tongues are soft and warm and wet and sloppy, but this one was so dry and cold, and rock hard. Not comfortable to touch when you're used to dogs being not preserved.

Lips and Cheeks: In a similar vein, the lips and cheeks are also a bit weird to see and feel. Probably what made them look so unusual was the fact that we had sawed the jaw in half, so a lot of the time we had it folded back or twisted in a highly unnatural manner, showing the inside of the cheeks or twisting the lips in a way that only added to the preserved-cold-dry feel.

Sawing through the face: Sometimes when we sawed through bone, everything was dissected away, but not all the time. In order to look at the inside of the skull in the muzzle, we put the saw to the nose (which, you might notice the theme, is cold and dry and preserved feeling) and just sawed on through the face. Getting the little section of skull off wasn't very creepy except for that first part, going through the nose. Dog noses are attached by cartilage, and if you have a dog you may have noticed how their noses are very wiggly and pliable. They're still wiggly and pliable after the dog is dead.

Nasal concha: After we did that, we could see into the nasal cavity. The way it works is there's a ton of thin, flat bone (called the nasal concha) that's all curly and covered in mucous, giving it lots of surface area. The air goes over that and dust or whatever crap you're breathing gets stuck on the mucous, and the nice clean air keeps going. For some reason our lab guide told us to remove the nasal concha, I think it was so we could see some openings in the bone (like where ducts open, such as the tear ducts). Since it's so thin and brittle, one of my lab partners just took his thumb and ripped it out. And, oh man, did it make such a haunting crunching noise! It is bone, after all, just very thin bone.

Abdominal Fat: If you've ever seen an abdominal surgery, you'll have seen that there's a sheet of fat and blood vessels that covers the intestines, attached at the top like an apron, which the surgeon has to lift away. This is where fat goes on fat people, and it's called the greater omentum. In the live animal, it's quite pink and fleshy. In the preserved dogs, it's very thin, transparent, and lacy. It's a lot like lacy curtains. It's weird.

Stomach: Dogs eat a lot of gross stuff. Digested dog food is one thing, but ours had tons hair (mostly dog hair), and even worse, a bunch of chewed up bone pieces she must have been fed. The inside of her stomach was pretty full. It was grainy or sandy to the touch. It was not cool.

The things that I expected to be worse:

Ribs: As I mentioned previously, the ribs are sort of in the way if you want to look at stuff in the thorax. What we did was to snap the bones at each end, but leave the muscles and everything attached, so it made a flap we could lift up. Snapping the ribs was actually pretty fun; we used bone cutters that are basically giant wire cutters. Since it was the first bone cutting lab, they had forgotten to put out safety goggles, and I tried to convince my lab group to let me do it since I was the only one with glasses. They weren't fooled, however.

Eyes: This is the classic thing you'd expect to be unsettling, especially when you cut them up and look at the goop inside. As it turns out, I didn't find it nearly as creepy as the empty eye socket, possibly because it's complicated enough to keep you interested in what you're seeing without getting grossed out. The lens was pretty cool too, it was a hard, oval little white thing rather like a hard candy.

Heart: To allow us to see blood vessels in the cadavres, they're filled with latex (red for arteries, blue for veins), so this transforms the hearts into very solid, latex-filled lumps. In order to actually understand the interior of the heart, we were given fresh sheep hearts to handle and dissect. This involved sticking lots of fingers in the chambers, and feeling soft flesh instead of the unnaturally dry, hard preserved material. It was a very good way to see what openings were where and was probably one of the best labs we did.

Brain: As you might have gathered from some previous posts, we took the brain out of our dog. Dog brains are pretty small--I look at my dog and feel pity--and they're shaped differently from a human's, because the spinal cord goes straight out the back rather than downwards from the bottom. It was a rubbery, squishy thing, kind of like those stress balls, and I spent a good portion of the lab being the one to hold it. Later on, we used a "brain knife" to cut it into transverse sections, which is like a small ruler with a sharp edge. That was cool because we could see all the structures inside the brain, and put it back together to see how it works in 3D. Some of the brain labs felt very Young Frankenstein.

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