Truths About Anatomy Lab

1) Anatomy lab makes you hungry. People claim it's the fumes; I happen to try to remember structures by identifying what type of food they resemble, but either way, everyone leaves lab famished.

2) Anatomy lab makes you lose your appetite. Despite having a pretty iron-clad stomach, nothing really induces nausea like swallowing a big gulp of formaldehyde and phenol while leaning your head into an empty thorax in a vain attempt to find yet another vein.

3) Anatomy lab is delicate. It only took a few attempts at scissor spreading fascia or trying to dig out a tiny vessel to confirm that I will never become a surgeon.

4) Anatomy lab is barbaric. Two words: bone saw.

5) Anatomy lab is terrible. You spend hours of your afternoon in a windowless dungeon trying to memorize an unfathomable list of terms while digging out never-ending globules of fat, only to realize that the tiny structure you're looking for is buried in fat. The fat you just ripped out.

6) Anatomy lab is incredible. In all seriousness, it truly is a privileged insight into the awe-inspiring complexity and beauty of the human body. Add the fact that a person made the choice to donate their body to further our medical education, and this rite of passage becomes all the more humbling.

*The image comes from Street Anatomy. Check it out.

**This post was written during time I should have spent studying anatomy.