I had a splitting headache

Today may have been the goriest day yet in Anatomy lab. Yesterday (my preceptor day) the lab group studied the pharynx and throat structures. As you can imagine, those are difficult to see (from the outside). In order to make them visible, they bisected (cut) the posterior (rear) muscles of the neck and lifted the head forward off of the spine (the anterior muscles were still attached). Basically imagine looking down with your chin on your chest, and your head popping off and continuing to roll forward until your eyes and nose were flat on your chest. But that sure opened up the area.

Well, I went to lab today and my tablemates reviewed the structures identified yesterday. Not too bad. Then we got going on today’s dissection. We were studying the nasal cavity and related structures (sinuses, etc.). Of course, you can’t see all the way up and back through the nostril so obviously you have to split the head into the right and left halves. I mean, what else could you do? And just who do you think the hacksaw (yes, hacksaw) was handed to? Yours truly. Not that I really minded though. Sparing you the grossest details, suffice it to say that it sounds just like you’d expect it to.

After I got the head split, we commenced to clean out the nasal septum and some extraneous structures. My group and I spent a long time cleaning and were very meticulous. We exposed all of the nerves and arteries and stuff that we needed to see when a professor came up to look at our work. His eyes got big he smiled. He said that, "he’d never seen that successfully dissected out intact before." He was talking about a tiny nervous ball (ganglion, cool word huh) hanging from a delicate nerve. He called the other professors over to show them. We tried to look nonchalant about it, but we were really beaming inside. Then he got on the microphone and told the entire lab to come over to our table and see our dissection. We took grief after class for that, but I think that my classmates were genuinely impressed. As much as I enjoy anatomy lab (and I seem to be quite good at the dissections), I do hope that I am able to get into surgery.

I also got my scores for the last exam of the horrible last week. I got another "B". I apparently took the 6 B’s talk a little too seriously. I feel OK about it though since my score was the average grade. I seem to be scoring within 1-2 % above or below average in all of my classes. In undergrad I would have been disappointed, but this is a little different. It makes me optimistic for graduating and passing all of my boards, but I hope it is enough to get into a good residency.