Finally, the day has come that I have been looking forward to more than almost any other. Today was the day of my anatomy lab final.
That’s right. I am done with the anatomy lab! At least for the next four weeks. But I am more than willing to take what I can get.
No more afternoons spent inhaling formaldehyde or staring blankly hoping that nerves will magically reveal themselves to me, no more nights spent trying to cram things into a brain that just wanted to sleep until one in the morning... no more anatomy lab. And especially with all the time I’ve spent in there the past week, I am only too happy to not go back.
The past couple weeks really have been crunch time, with all of my teachers trying to get in their final quizzes and exams before finals week next week. But the one I had been dreading more than any other was anatomy. Mostly just because it is a hell of a lot of information, and I was not convinced it was humanly possible to learn it all.
My anatomy lab final consisted of 25 stations of radiographs, sagittal sections, transverse sections, dogs and cats, random limbs, brains, you name it, it was there. 100 questions in all, and over 2 hours spent answering them. 2 hours of pure anatomy agony. Somehow we are supposed to know how to find every single individual nerve and artery in every one of those sections, even though we’re looking at things we’ve never seen before, by “using our knowledge of the structures and common sense”. I’m not going to lie, it’s intimidating.
But it made me laugh, too, to stand there in lab feeling a humerus bone wrapped up in a sock- we had to figure out which bone it was and which side of the body it was from by touch alone- and remember back to when we did this in our second ever anatomy class with the scapula bone. And I was sitting in class holding this scapula in my hands with my eyes closed, listening to my teacher explaining the various landmarks we should be using to tell which side was lateral, which side was cranial, and so on, and thinking that there was absolutely no way I was ever going to be able to do this. Tell which bone it was without looking at it? Impossible. Be able to tell which side of the body it belonged to by feeling miniscule little bumps and ridges on one surface or another? No. No, it couldn’t be done.
And yet... somehow I did it. I don’t know how, but I did it. I managed to learn little bumps and grooves that seemed like they should be insignificant, I learned muscle attachments and functions, I learned nerve innervations and blood supply... the list goes on and on. And on and on. And now all I had to do was be able to find everything on the dogs and sections one last time and I would be done. It was the light at the end of the tunnel.
And now... I’m done.
Granted, I still have the written portion of the final exam on Monday, but I’ve always been better at that part. I can learn everything we need to know, I just can’t always find it. And now I’m done with finding everything. It makes me so incredibly happy to be able to say that.
And even though I don’t want to think about anatomy at all over the next 4 weeks, even with the written portion of the final looming up soon, I have to admit that I think... I think I’m going to miss it. Not the formaldehyde smell, or the dissecting, of the hours taken from my life to study. I’m going to miss the hilarious and ridiculous things that happened in that lab while we were trying to learn. And just to give an example of how brainwashed we all were to think alike, there was one station with a couple brain sections and then, randomly, an elephant’s forelimb (which is taller than I am). And the way these tests work is to stick little pins in the structures we need to identify or describe something about or whatever it is, and we have a sheet with instructions for what we need to do with each pin. It was the “D” tag stuck in a carpal bone of this elephant’s forelimb, and the directions for D were to look ventrolaterally, and then identify.
And, in unison, me and the other two members of my anatomy group looked down at the ground- ventrally- and then to the right- laterally- where we finally saw the little green tag stuck in the elephants leg.
Maybe it’s one of those things where you had to be there to get it, but we thought it was absolutely hilarious that we act like complete robots now with anatomy, like some sort of synchronized anatomy group.
Maybe you had to be there. But that’s what I’m going to miss... that and Shawn writing "corpus callosum of the brain" as one of our answers until I told him to change brain to telencephalon. His response? "Yeah, that sounds a lot smarter than brain." That's what I'm going to miss. Not enough to go back, though. Especially not with only a four week vacation until I'm back in there. But we had some good times.
Now bring on the ponies.
and just in case you ever wondered what a brain section looked like
here we have the ventral surface of the brain and brainstem
and transverse sections of the telencephalon, diencephalon, mesencephalon, met encephalon, and my encephalon
No comments:
Post a Comment