Sunday, December 28, 2008

Grossest thing I've done in school so far

One of the greatest questions that I get from friends and family is "what is the grossest thing you've done in school?" I've gotten to do some really crazy stuff that would get somebody thrown in prison for a long time if they were to do it on the street. When I put on my white coat, people start telling me about every drug they've ever done, every sexual experience they've ever had, the state of their bowel movements, exactly what color their urine is, what their dietary habits are, as well as every other possible detail they feel the need to tell me about. I've learned how to properly perform a pelvic exam on a woman through experience and have been informed to never say "everything looks good!" for fear that the patient may take that in a sexual manner. I did my first male genital exam on a freshman college student that was forced to let us molest them in the name of science due to his pledging to a fraternity at the local university. These types of experiences have been labeled as "gross" by many of the people close to me, but they have always been the mundane experiences a medical student goes through on a day-to-day basis. The things that I would label as "gross" have been the type of thing that makes your stomach turn a little bit. The two experiences that come to mind immediately were in anatomy lab. The first was when I took a hacksaw to a cadaver's arm and cut it clean off. It wasn't the act of cutting the arm off that turned my stomach a little but rather the fact that it was as easy as it was. It took five small strokes with the saw to cut all the way through the arm. When I say a hacksaw, I mean a rusty piece of crap that had been laying in the corner of the lab for the past 25 years without having the blade replaced. Absolutely incredible how fragile the human body is...until you get to the neck. The second experience is when we pealed away the muscles and ligaments of the neck in order to pull the head of our cadaver clear from the spine. It took FOREVER! We had to do it by hand in order to maintain the nerves and basic musculature. It was very interesting to see how well the head is attached to the rest of the body. The whole time I was imagining what kind of force would be required to cause the equal amount of damage that we were inflicting on our subject. Yep, I'd say those experiences could easily be labeled as "gross."

1 comment:

Emily Rader said...

No new stories? Sadness. I was hoping for some incredibly informative stories about life in Kirksville in the Springtime so I don't have to pay attention in class on three hours of sleep.