I'm going to need liquor after this

9/27/2012

Yesterday was pretty boring. I had human anatomy in the morning and we started to go over the muscles of the upper thorax. I can tell this is a class I’m going to study hard for. After class Lousia, Caroline  and I went to Interval (a bar/restaurant in the union) for lunch. I had a delicious leek and potato soup that was perfect for the rainy day.  After lunch Lousia, and Caroline went to the biomedical lab for there human dissection practical. I headed to the National Health Service building so I could register for the doctor. All my medical expenses while I’m here is covered by the NHS, so this would be a really good time to get sick :p.

Today was much more exciting. I had my Human anatomy lab In the afternoon which I was really nervous for. We do our dissection on human cadavers, people who have donated their bodies to science. I've never really seen a dead body before, except at wakes or memorial services (and I wasn’t cutting in to them). We walked into the room and I immediately was freaked out. There are just rows and rows of bodies, some covered and some being worked on. We share this area with all of the biomedical students so they were there as well. All of the bodies are this ashen gray color and some are very sunken in. We went to the back room to put our coats and bags away and to put on our lab coats. We had to sign a contract with all the rules of the lab on them. It basically stated that if we ever compromised the dignity of the remains we would get kicked out and fail the class. This means no pictures, no taking unauthorized people into the room, and being careful of how we talk about the remains out of class. So I can’t really go into detail on what we did.

The actual dissection part was really hard for me. When our teacher pulled back the right side skin of the chest to show us what we would be doing I gasped and had to back up. I composed myself and listened to what our teacher was saying. Our individual had a lot of fatty tissue so we spent most of the class clearing it away before isolating the pectoralis major. It is pretty cool to see the actual muscle we learned about in class. During the dissection I did have to remove myself from the room because I was feeling light headed and a bit faint, but I wasn’t the only one.

After class I headed to Tesco and bought a much needed bottle of wine and headed home to make dinner.  For dinner I made chicken quesadillas, which were delicious if I do say so myself. At 7:30 Cindy and I went to a belly dancing class. It was really fun to do even though I wasn’t that good at it. I think it will be a class I do every week, maybe I’ll get some dancing skills out of it.