School!

(posted by Ryan)

I think that I survived my first week of school. We had one day of orientation and then just jumped right in. Anatomy is without a doubt the busiest class I've ever had. On the first day, we went to lecture for 5 hours with a quick lunch break in the middle, and then went to the cadaver lab. We got divided up into small groups and were assigned an embalmed cadaver to work with for the next few weeks. Without much instruction, they had us just start cutting and pulling off skin and fat tissue to view the chest wall muscles. We have a really heavy cadaver and it took a good few hours to even get to where we could see the muscles. None of us really have a whole lot of experience in cutting up dead people, so we just guess as we go. It is interesting, and messy, and smelly. It's hard to eat later after seeing that, and not being able to get the formaldehyde smell off your hands.

We have 3 more dissection sessions until our first test, and there are only 200 body parts we need to identify and 160 pages worth of lecture material to know. Not stressful at all. Bekah and the kids usually get to see me for a few minutes in the evenings.

I do like it though, minus the smells, and think that we will be happy here for the next few years. Wish us luck!