Flow Charts and Frozen Heads

This past week has been spent studying for my second anatomy test today. Pictured are some flow charts I made to help me visualize the arteries of the head and neck. I taped them to the wall in the living room for easy reference (Sorry Mom I do know better than to tape things to walls, but drastic amounts of information to be learned calls for drastic measures). Not only do I need to know the branching pattern of all of the major arteries but where they start, and end along with what they mainly feed and any other random fact the professor adds. All of this is just about the arteries! The test is also going to include veins and everything known to man about the 12 cranial nerves!

At my interview here last fall they recommended taking an anatomy course prior to coming to school claiming it would be very helpful. So I took anatomy this past summer. While it has been somewhat helpful nothing could have prepared me for the depth of this anatomy course. Another thing about anatomy that came up during my interview was cadavers. During the tour the guide (a second year) mentioned that the school may be getting cadavers for the first years, a relatively new thing I guess since his class did not get to work with one.

Well turned out last year the students did get a cadaver, but the funds were not there this year for our class. About a month ago we found out that we would get a limited cadaver lab, just the head and neck (which works out fine since that is the part of the body that is most relevant to optometrists). So Saturday was the big day; 1 head for all 124 of us students to look at. Each lab group was assigned a slot to come to school to observe. The cadaver was not in formaldehyde but was actually frozen. The benefit of this is that the coloring is preserved since formaldehyde turns everything a grey color. Plus it smells a little better at first anyways.

It was a very interesting experience to say the least. I was fine at first looking at the tagged parts, but once our professor started tugging on things and moving parts out of the way I started to feel a little light-headed. After removing myself from the room, sitting and sipping on water and chatting with a fellow light-headed classmate I felt better and was able to go back in the lab. Along with the frozen cadaver there were other heads that had been sectioned (cut in different ways to see different structures) and preserved in formaldehyde. Overall it was a pretty cool thing to observe, but I'm glad I don't have to do it again anytime soon!