Week 4: Holding a human heart, no big deal

The past weeks dissections have been the coooooolest by far! We are working on the thoracic cavity so we have been learning about the lungs, heart, and everything close to them. Tuesday we took out the lungs and Thursday we took out the heart! As mentioned before, our cadaver has a pacemaker so the wires had to be cut. Now, you can see the leads coming out of various parts of the heart and where they are connecting too, very cool to see.

Wednesday was my birthday and I was blessed with no anatomy lab. Instead, we were in the lecture hall for most of the day. What I thought would be a nice break from the lab turned into a very dull day that made me actually miss dissecting (well not so much the dissecting as more the finding and reviewing actual anatomy versus pictures on powerpoints). We finished up around 4 and some friends took me out to get Thai food. This was my first time eating Thia (everyone was shocked to hear this as I am apparently the last remaining person on earth to have eaten this type of cuisine) and after a great meal we all branched off to study. I went home and hung out with dad for a while and got about an hour of studying in before I feel asleep around 10:30. I tried to make up for this by waking up very early the next day and getting to school to review in the morning.

Thursday we dissected out the heart in the morning and in the afternoon we had ECM. This week we brought in our materials and got to ‘learn’ how to use them. I am pretty competent at taking blood pressures but everything else I am going to need a LOT of practice on. This coming week we have another patient encounter. We are perfecting the art of taking a comprehensive patient history and this time will be timed both seeing the patient and then after as we fill out their ‘chart.’

Looking back at my posts, I realized I haven’t really mentioned our Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine (OMM) class yet. We have it every Tuesday from 1 to 5 and this is where we get to learn the special techniques osteopathic doctors use. We are still learning the basics of what is ‘normal’ and how we can determine it, so we haven’t really gotten into the cool stuff yet.

Friday was a shorter day which I filled by going to the anatomy lab and reviewing everything we had learned that week. I spent the night with my second family and started off a relaxing labor day weekend J