Before the first lab, I too was apprehensive about dissection. I heard stories from second-year students about the smell, the rotten flesh, the foul smell when they took the practical exam in May. My big was telling me ?If you think it smells bad now, wait till May, it?ll only get worse and worse.? I was also worried about my allergies, because I wasn?t sure whether or not I?m allergic to formaldehyde or other chemicals in the lab. I don?t want to be the only person wearing a bio-warfare mask. I was also scared about horrible stories of rigor mortis I heard when I was a kid. I know it won?t happen, but anything can happen. All the guys in my group are pretty macho about it. But when it came to making the first cut, guess what I was the first one.
During the orientation, I got to see a dead body for the first time. She was an old woman. One big relief that occurred to me was that my nose was not allergic to anything in the lab. She looked very different from a living person. It was kind of hard to picture that she was once a living person. I spent couple seconds thanking her for giving us this opportunity to learn.
Doing dissection reminds me of that when I was a kid, I loved to dismantle things like radios or clocks, just to see what?s inside without any intensions of putting things back together again. That?s how I feel sometimes when I cut the muscles or chisel the vertebrae. And there?s a lot of oops during dissection as well as when I dismantled things.
After the first week of dissection, I found myself seeing our cadaver as a collection of body parts instead of a whole person. I guess I became detached and distant from this person. I guess I began to perceive this body as a soulless learning tool. It wasn't till when we were dissecting the hand that I realized I was holding our cadaver's hand, it was a weird feeling.
Of course, there is the decapitation of the head and making the sagital section through the head in the spring... Something to look forward to... ...
