Dissection day 4: Not a safe day to read

Hi all,

Didn't blog last night because I had a really awesome energy work session done last night by a classmate of mine, and I needed to sleep a whole lot. Very, very cool stuff.

Again, this day was pretty intense. Do not read if you are unnerved by anything I've written so far. If you haven't been reading, this is a bad day to start.


Things I learned yesterday:

When dissecting the digestive system, take extreme care not to puncture the intestines. This is very, very important.

Should you puncture the intestines, much cleanup will have to ensue. We definitely had a day of poop going on.

Despite this, we managed to remove the heart and lungs as a unit-- just fabulous. The lungs really are huge, and much heavier than the heart. May had an enlarged heart and a gigantic aorta; even so, the lungs are enormous and weighty!

We also managed to remove (most) of the digestive system at a go. The relationships are fascinating. The esophagus really does run right down the front of the spine, and the inferior vena cava runs right down into the liver. The heart itself is sitting right on top of the liver, with the diaphragm in between them, and the stomach and spleen take up the other lobe of the diaphragm. The kidneys, adrenals, and upper psoas indeed hang out right next to each other in the back of the diaphragm, and the ovaries also hang out on the psoas. I knew all these things intellectually, but seeing them in situ really brings home the interrelatedness of the organs and muscles.

Speaking of psoas, leaving it in place while removing the viscera illustrates quite clearly the 2 separate bowls of the upper and lower pelvis. I had read about this recently, and even looking at a skeleton could only vaguely see the divisions, but the reality of it is that the upper iliac crests form one bowl, then the sacrum dives down and back, forming almost a pelvic cylinder rather than a pelvic floor. It's fascinating, and will definitely inform my teaching in the future.

Today, with any luck, we'll see the rotator cuff, deep rotators of the hip, and possibly even the attachments of the psoas and psoas minor.

Yay.

--Melissa V.