Blanchie lost her head

I'm glad that I read through the anatomy lab instructions on my way to school this morning. I usually do, but I didn't realize that I had a lab today until about 9 this morning so I wasn't sure I was going to get time. Thank heavens I did, because halfway down the first page, I spied this:

Prior to the lab, the heads will have been removed from the cadavers and bisected in the median (mid-sagittal) plane. Because the nasal septum usually deviates to one side...

Wait, wait, back up. YOU DECAPITATED BLANCHE?

Blanche is the name of my group's cadaver. I don't know why we named her, but most groups do. It seems to make the dissections easier to handle, although you'd think it would have the opposite effect. Mostly I think it just disseminates tension.

We've been learning from Blanche for just over a term now. Everything we know about muscles and nerves and arteries and tendons has been worked out on her. I know her dissections inside and out, pretty much literally. We've gotten used to her being in a certain state of degradation. We cut her skin and reflected fascia and dug around to expose things that are normally not exposed, but somehow that didn't change her essential Blanche-ness. We got to know her, in a weird, morbid way.

So I'm glad I was warned ahead of time that, when I got to the lab today, her face would no longer be recognizable. (Or, like, attached to the rest of her.) Because now, she's substantially less human, and despite everything we've already done, this could still have come as a shock. Cut open was one thing. Cut into three pieces is another.

Don't get me wrong -- lab today was wicked cool. I've never before seen a dissection that looks...exactly like the textbook picture. And Blanche's falx cerebri (the sheet of tissue that separates the left and right hemispheres of the brain) was partially ossified, which is apparently of interest -- so we had all the profs and dissection TAs crowding around for a look. This had to happen eventually, I knew that. It was just a bit of a surprise...and, oddly enough, a bit of a loss.

~isolde

Labels: school