miss akay

A serenade to gross anatomy

This song just about sums it up!

posted by miss akay @ 12:18 AM 0 comments

Gross Anatomy ends...

Mixed emotions about this class ending. I wish I had blogged every week. It has been a fascinating adventure, rich with crazy memories and bonding experiences. Tonight, I left the lab at 11pm for the last time that I will ever study in the gross lab. Tomorrow at 9am, the lab is closed for the professors to prepare the bodies for us to be tested on, day after tomorrow. Now we have to study our books and keep all the pictures fresh in our heads. Tonight I was giving a tour of the head on my cadaver to other students in our class. The dissection was beautiful. I have my partner, Ahmed to thank for that. He knows his neuro and head anatomy forwards and backwards. Digging through the cranial nerves, muscles and arteries of the face felt more familiar than ever. Thank goodness! Cruising through the branches of the external carotid artery, facial nerves, and hyoid muscles was good practice. I found our anca cervicalis, which had been destroyed in most other bodies. Though someone cut out our phrenic nerve (curses!), I was able to find the remnants of it. For the first time I found the external and internal laryngeal nerves, along with the superior thyroid artery. The artery wasn't hard to find... it's the dang nerves that are fragile and tiny. There are still a few muscles that I am less familiar with: styloglossus and stylopharyngeus, that I can find consistently on one of the cadavers, but not on any of the others. Then the hypoglossus nerve and glossopharyngeal nerves... the first one I can consistently find, as of tonight... the second one I might be able to find if I returned to the same body.

Disecting the eye was a little disappointing. I guess because there was no mystery to it anymore. We didn't get to dissect anything of the ear, because it is pretty well encased in bone. As far as mysteries go, the ear, no matter how much I study, it is a mysterious device. Very intriqueing how it works. I mean... who thought this stuff up?! Little cells with hairs, stuck in goo that transduce a signal when the hairs get jostled about... and then taking that signal and turning it into sounds... wtf?! It's a little bit crazy, if you ask me. But sound has always mystified me for some reason. Light makes sense. Sounds waves.... not so much! The eye is amazing, but the ear is just crazy.

Ok... I promise myself that I will try and relive the funny moments from lab and put them in my blog as time allows, but it has been a very long day. We had our neurobiology final exam today (it was a mean test) and our gross anatomy finals are day after tomorrow (expected to be no better). I have a ton of material to learn and an incomprehensible amount of material to memorize. So, sleep is in order for my hippocampus to start cranking out proteins for some major long-term potentiation action... Goooo NMDA and AMPA receptors! I don't want to have to learn everything I mastered today.

Sleeeeeeep!!! :) I can't wait.

posted by miss akay @ 11:59 PM 0 comments