Favorite Day of Anatomy (So Far)

These are some thoughts I had after an anatomy lab a month or so into school. I'm pretty sure it was still my favorite day of anatomy - although removing the heart was right up there.

Today's lab experience was very different. It was our first day using more brute force tools to find what we were looking for. Our goal was to see the spinal cord in all it's glory, but to do so we needed to chisel out the posterior portion of the vertebral column and pull it out to see underneath.

That was a bizarre experience: we students respect the body and the person who donated it to our education, we've tried to conduct ourselves with respect and we are inevitably filled with awe at the cadaver. However, here our thoughts and behavior didn't seem to match as we pounded a sharp chisel, snapping bones and wrenching forcefully on a body we previously too only precision scalpels to. It was a bit disturbing at first to hear the sounds, but it was all worth the end goal, to see the tiny glistening spinal cord on the other side. It's just incredible that such a small and delicate thing is what lies inside us, keeps us moving, working and experiencing so much of the world.

I feel like I just never really appreciated what I had under my skin and bones until I saw that spinal cord. As a child, all of the talk of people breaking their backs and causing spinal cord injuries made me think of it as a yellow Jell-O jiggler embedded in our vertebrae.

Then in school they show you diagrams like this one from Wikipedia, which never completely make sense on their own.

It all just made so much more sense after seeing the actual spinal cord. What we saw glistening under the vertebral fragment was the cord wrapped in it's tough meningeal covering, a cover that surrounds all of our central nervous system. We cut through that to find the the incredibly small spinal cord with even smaller (but strong) roots of the spinal nerves. All those images of lemon Jell-O are gone now, the spinal cord finally makes sense to me and the basics of it all make sense to me now. All this time in that smelly lab are paying off.

One final observation that deepened our respect for our donor: as we cut through the vertebral laminae, we found that the spinal column curved laterally as it went down the body in what looked like scoliosis. One of my tankmates and I both were diagnosed with scoliosis as children in middle school (yeah, we were the one's they called back after those physicals) and for me this made me feel an extra connection to the person who donated their body.