And it starts...

I arose bright and early this morning to the stress of knowing I wasn't even prepared for my first day of medical school. The professor had sent out an email a few days ago advising the class to read 30 pages of the anatomy book and then glance over the lecture notes. I had forgotten to do both until late that night so I decided to just get up early and do it in the morning. Although, after the extreme increase of adrenaline that was screaming throughout my body after watching Phelps et al win the relay last night, I probably should have just stayed up and done it then. Nonetheless, I awoke before dawn and accomplished everything asked of me, including taking the obligatory First Day of School picture in my brand new scrubs.

Simply put, class was a bore. I printed out my notes in color so I didn't even get to color along, which is why I was looking forward to anatomy so much. But after suffering through 2 hours of the lecture on the back muscles and vertebrae, we were led to the anatomy lab and set up shop around our cadaver. When we got there all the bodies were covered in coffin-like apparatus so we had no idea what our bodies looked like. Male of female? Black, white, brown, or yellow? Fat or skinny? Young or old? The anticipation was unbelievable. The combination of excitement with nerves, the smell of wintergreen formaldehyde pervading through the cadavers, and the 116 people crammed into a lab was almost as exhilarating as the opening ceremonies in Beijing this past Friday night. Almost.

When they told us to open up our dissection tables, I wasn't prepared to see my guy laying there face up. I had assumed they would have already flipped him over since we were dissecting the back today, but no, we got to do that ourselves. The skin was extremely hard, like rubber. I volunteered to be the first person to grab the scalpel and go at it (once the teacher had come to our table and explained what we were supposed to do). You had to put some strength in it to cut through all the skin and fat. Our guy* had a few extra pounds to spare, so cutting through his lower back and shoulder/neck area was particularly difficult because the excess amount of superficial fascia. FYI, fat is disgusting. No more McDonalds.

The two hours we were in there flew by. I had not really been looking forward to lab because I didn't know how well I would handle cutting open a dead body, but I quickly got into it and had a blast working with my lab partners. Getting to actually touch and hold the lattisimus dorsi, trapezius, deltoid, all these muscles that I had worked on toning so vigorously in the gym the past 5 years on my life, was amazing.

So let the studying commence. This is the beginning of a long 4 years.

*We haven't named our cadaver yet. Many names are up for debate. He has to have a distinguished name because he was kind enough to donate his body to science. So far Winston, Albert, and Carl have been thrown out there. We're going to give him a full name (first, middle, and last) and we've already knighted him as a "sir". Let me know of any good prestigious sounding names that you can think of.