nauseated for a different reason

[PAgirl]

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This is kind of a mix of a couple of recent posts. I never thought I would mind gross lab- I had seen surgeries and everything was fine. I was actually really excited to start cutting. But my body is very large, and while I'm grateful to her for dinating her body, I'm on the verge of vomiting/passing out each day because of the fat we have to get through. I find the multiple forms of it revolting- the way it pools as a semi-liquid in invaginated areas or forms a kind of foamy substance in other areas. It's definitely better when I'm dissecting than just watching, but if I'm working on an area that has a lot of fat, sometimes I can't get past it and have to have someone else cut. Some of my lab group members are also completely disgusted with it and have the same problem. Has anyone else experienced this, and do you have an helpful ideas for trying to get past it and not focus on it so much? Thanks.

 

[PeepshowJohnny]

You get over it.

We had the "tons of fun" style body first year. After a while it dries out a bit, you get through the putrificaiton layers and it get's a bit easier.

 

[USCguy]

As stated in a previous post, my group has a gi-normous body. We had to flip her, TWICE, yesterday while bisecting the head. She had been supine for about 4 weeks, and some god awful smell had been brewing under her back. When we flipped her over, I got a huge wiff of it and nearly puked. That was the first time I had actually gagged while working with this body. When we flipped her the second time, I was wearing respiratory protection, and the smell was not nearly as bad. So, try wearing a cheap sugical mask. I also sprinkled some of the preservative with wintergreen flavor on her to help mask the smell a little bit.


Definitely dreading the abdomen

 

[sprinkibrio]

I don't mean to be coarse, but cutting up cadavers has never struck me as that bad. Some people at my school are revolted by other students wearing their scrubs to lecture (we wear gowns over them so they never get dirty) and wear their hair under a scarf and dryer sheet so as not to get smelly. What's going to happen when we're vomited or shat on or deliver a baby that pooped in the womb right before delivery? Or get a prostitute or homeless person's blood on us? Or get spit on by someone with HIV? What's going to happen when we see the truly grossest thing in the world--people who come in maimed and hanging onto life by a thread because they were beat up by their husband, hit by a drunk driver, or caught in a house fire? That is gross to the core of one's soul. Fat and smell is just nothing compared to that.

 

[HailMary]

What's going to happen when we're vomited or shat on or deliver a baby that pooped in the womb right before delivery? Or get a prostitute or homeless person's blood on us? Or get spit on by someone with HIV? What's going to happen when we see the truly grossest thing in the world--people who come in maimed and hanging onto life by a thread because they were beat up by their husband, hit by a drunk driver, or caught in a house fire? That is gross to the core of one's soul. Fat and smell is just nothing compared to that.

Since getting spit on won't put you at risk for getting HIV, it's nowhere near as gross as the other things you mentioned here...

 

[smq123]

I don't mean to be coarse, but cutting up cadavers has never struck me as that bad. Some people at my school are revolted by other students wearing their scrubs to lecture (we wear gowns over them so they never get dirty) and wear their hair under a scarf and dryer sheet so as not to get smelly. What's going to happen when we're vomited or shat on or deliver a baby that pooped in the womb right before delivery? Or get a prostitute or homeless person's blood on us? Or get spit on by someone with HIV? What's going to happen when we see the truly grossest thing in the world--people who come in maimed and hanging onto life by a thread because they were beat up by their husband, hit by a drunk driver, or caught in a house fire? That is gross to the core of one's soul. Fat and smell is just nothing compared to that.

* Got vomited on by a woman in labor.

* Delivered a baby and got meconium and amniotic fluid all over my feet. (Some on my face too...long story)

* Did speculum exams on women with the worst cases of BV you could imagine.

* Did speculum exams on women who have not washed or showered in a few days.

* Have had to test sensation on necrotic diabetic feet.

And I still think that gross anatomy lab is much more disgusting than those things. The smell from those things never got stuck in my nose the way that gross anatomy lab smells did.

 

[osli]

Gross lab shouldn't smell that bad. Either the bodies aren't formalin fixed right, or the air handlers are inadequate, or you just don't like the formalin smell. 🙂

The fat can be disgusting, but what in medicine isn't? We often go straight from the lab to the cafeteria. Standing down there for hours seems to make us hungry.

As for ways to get past the disgusting factor, just remember that it does get better later after you have removed superficial layers, and not everyone is destined to be a surgeon.

 

[Terpskins99]

Gross lab shouldn't smell that bad. Either the bodies aren't formalin fixed right, or the air handlers are inadequate, or you just don't like the formalin smell. 🙂

The fat can be disgusting, but what in medicine isn't? We often go straight from the lab to the cafeteria. Standing down there for hours seems to make us hungry.

As for ways to get past the disgusting factor, just remember that it does get better later after you have removed superficial layers, and not everyone is destined to be a surgeon.

I also know for a fact that the anatomy lab you dissected in is extremely well ventilated as compared with labs at many other programs. 😉 The cadavers don't smell nearly as much as they could.

Anyhow, I did my first rectal/guaiac stool test yesterday and that easily grossed me out more than anything during anatomy lab. heheh, I also had an HIV+ guy spit at me a couple weeks ago... but that just pissed me off more than anything else. I swear, that guy made it his mission in life to make every nurse/doctor/technician as miserable as possible.

Btw, wouldn't spitting at someone's face be considered assault & battery? Wouldn't someone potentially get arrested for doing that out on the streets?

 

[Hard24Get]

* Got vomited on by a woman in labor.

* Delivered a baby and got meconium and amniotic fluid all over my feet. (Some on my face too...long story)

* Did speculum exams on women with the worst cases of BV you could imagine.

* Did speculum exams on women who have not washed or showered in a few days.

* Have had to test sensation on necrotic diabetic feet.

And I still think that gross anatomy lab is much more disgusting than those things. The smell from those things never got stuck in my nose the way that gross anatomy lab smells did.

I agree. I have participated in colonoscopies on unprepped, ischemic bowel with the pungent smell of melena, dealt with all types of vomitus, I&Ded putrid abscesses, changed bandages on pts with wet gangrene, throughly examined homeless people soaked in urine and feces, helped do an autopsy, etc, etc, etc and nothing gets me like an incompletely fixed cadaver in anatomy lab. So I can sympathize. I deal with stinky stuff by always chewing mint gum and using double-protection to make sure none of it got on me. You will survive, but you won't want to go back.

The fat can be disgusting, but what in medicine isn't? We often go straight from the lab to the cafeteria. Standing down there for hours seems to make us hungry.

As for ways to get past the disgusting factor, just remember that it does get better later after you have removed superficial layers, and not everyone is destined to be a surgeon.

On the contrary, many incompletely fixed bodies get worse in the abdominal cavity, where there is tons of peritoneal fat, etc to oppose fixation.
Also, there is no connection between enjoying disgusting gross anatomy with fixed, putrid bodies and enjoying surgery on a living being, which is actually quite lovely and rarely smelly by comparison (even in the context of perfed bowel) 😍

 

[Quix]

When I was working on the geropsych unit, we had patients who were all kinds of foul and malodorous. We used a little VapoRub under our noses to cut down on the smell.

 

[pagemmapants]

See, I was the opposite of smq: I was perfectly fine in gross lab (possibly due to the fact I had a teensy little 80 year old man s/p (heh) pancreatic cancer.

Barfed on? Ok, maybe not as bad.
I&D of feet infected with MRSA? Worse
Vaginal delivery, even with no complications? Worse
Vaginal delivery (+) meconium? Worse still
BV + Trich in the same patient? Real bad.

 

[cfdavid]

One of the benefits of lots of fat is that it makes "skinning" a lot easier. Contrast that with minimal body fat and your margin for error is greater, and you need to be more careful.

 

[hale-bopp]

first of all, this thread is totally NOT what I thought it was about from the title.

as far as nausea in anatomy lab related to smell - try putting vicks vaporub under your nose/around your nostrils. it helps.

 

[Jwax]

Some people at my school are revolted by other students wearing their scrubs to lecture (we wear gowns over them so they never get dirty).

We are required to wear lab coats, but the smell just seeps through. I think a lot of us rarely take our lab scrubs home to wash, so wearing the scrubs that have been worn for a month in cadaver lab to lecture for an hour? Severely gross. I also don't see the point. You aren't going to finish with lab that much faster by sitting through lecture in your smelly scrubs and rushing down to lab vs. changing after lecture.

The smell of lab doesn't particularly bother me. I really don't find it that bad down there. I strongly dislike how I smell afterwards (even though I scrub the hell out of my hands x10 they still stink for hours). But, that doesn't compare to the scent of an abscess being drained under your nose nor the smell of a person leaking urine as they are getting a stool sample taken (when they have been constipated for a while). 👎 I almost gagged on both of those, and my sense of smell is not that great.

There was a person on SDN who had a quote that was something like, "If you are close enough to smell a patient, then it is a clinical experience." I liked that.

Anyways- I think a lot of people find solace in flavored hard candy, such as Jolly Ranchers, to suck on during lab. Vicks Vapor Rub sounds like good advice, too.