from 2010: And this is how anatomy is going...

from 2010: So, I finished my first dissection. The first day of dissection was this really bizarre mix of rabid fascination and sheer disgust. Skinning the gluteal muscles went really well. They're big; they're easy to differentiate. We then moved on to the back of the thigh and the popliteal area. The popliteal area (behind the knee) has a lot of deep fat no matter how thin your cadaver is, so there's a lot of digging involved with uncovering and differentiating structures. That was when I felt a pit in my stomach, a wrenched expression overtaking my face, and had to look away and breathe slowly.

That heinous feeling happened less with each dissecting session, until I finally got to where I can dig around with my fingers between musculature, tear away fat with abandon, and probe canals into other compartments of the body with nary a gag. By the time of our demo (where we present all the structures we've found and their functions in 10 minutes), I was handling the cadaver and its structures with gusto, if not reckless abandon.

By the way, the knee is weird. When I cut into the knee with the scalpel, it shed synovial fluid all over the place. It was clear, viscous, and alarmingly alive-seeming. I got to touch an ACL, PCL, MCL, and LCL. I really think differently about bodies even after dissecting just one section of a body.

And I have some new vocab words:
inguinal ligament
popliteal fossa
vastus intermedius
ascending circumflex artery
cruciate anastomosis
and about fifty more...

Tree shopping update. Finally went last night and it took about three times as long as it should have. By the end of the night, R and I were both pretty grumpy and KidM and KidV were, too. KidM ended up busting her lip and remaining top front tooth on her bed frame at 10 pm (yeah, she had just gone to bed...bad parent!).

Nonetheless, I hope everyone is gearing up for a delightful holiday. I have pared down my Christmas crafting ambitions to only dough ornaments and Christmas cookies. I hope to post pics once they're in progress. It may be Christmas day at this rate!