Random Post 2

Anatomy

This semester I'm taking Meds 320: Cadaveric Human Anatomy. In this class, we are taught gross anatomy at USC Keck Medical School by the med school's first year Anatomy professor. Each week, we have lab in the cadaver lab at Keck, and we get to open up and look inside human bodies that have already been dissected by the medical students. What is interesting about these bodies is that the donors chose specifically to donate them to Keck, and therefore had to live within 50 miles of the medical school. Other medical schools get their donor bodies from a California state "donor bank", so their donors cannot choose which medical school will use them. Because all of the donors lived in Southern California,  their lungs have some black coloring from tar inhaled while living here. I know it's not something nice to think about, but if we were to live here our whole lives, we would end up with the same discoloring because of the smog that covers Los Angeles.

This class has been extremely interesting, and I look forward to visiting the lab each week. In the lab, our professor receives teaching assistance from first and second year medical students. It is also fun to interact with them and learn what daily life in medical school is. Each week I'm amazed at how much they know, and how they're able to differentiate everything in the body. Sometimes when we look in the donors' bodies, it's very hard for me to see the difference between a nerve and a vein, unless I look at their starting and end points. For them, they can just look at it and know automatically what structure it is. Although a difficult class, Meds 320 has been one of my favorite classes at USC.

Our professor also gives us a lot of opportunities to be in the lab more if we want to be. This past Monday, I helped him dissect ears. Basically, I had to knock of the top of the temporal bone in a donor's skull with a chisel and hammer in order to see the donor's middle ear. It was much harder than it sounds! The temporal bone is the strongest bone in our body, so I had to hit the chisel several times before it even budged a little. In the end I dissected three ears successfully, and was able to keep the stapes (one of our three tiny middle ear bones) intact in each of them. It was such a fun learning experience and made me look forward to my first year of Anatomy in medical school when I'll be able to dissect much more than just an ear!