Saturday, March 31, 2012

Biology students are perhaps serial killers in training

Hello interwebs! Long time no see, you seem to have gotten more bloated since last we met!

I've been ridiculously busy with my anatomy class. Fast track is brutal. While mostly disgusted with the material, I have been learning useful bits of information that may help in future efforts to help my CPR students to not kill someone in a life or death emergency.

Mostly though, I've discovered that anyone taking biology or going into medical training has to be incredibly morbid and twisted. Historically, researching the physiology of the human body was difficult as it was hard to make observations of a person's innards because skin was often in the way. Heck, early medical students would sneak bodies out of graveyards in order to cut them open to observe what the guts looked like. I will never look at a game of Operation the same way.

Torturing small animals seems to be the favorite way to discover things. For example, to figure out how muscles worked, one experiment has weights put on the calf muscle of a frog at increasing amounts and measuring the electric charge put out. Then there's the experiment where the frogs (while still alive!) were cut open and flooded with saline and had the fluids switched around to demonstrate neurotransmitters and their effect on heart rate! And the rant about injecting small animals with things, and cutting parts off just to see what will happen will have to wait for another time. Besides, my brief temp job many years ago in a medical research facility scarred me plenty on that score.

Then there's my fellow classmates. I have the fortune and bad karma to sit next to people in lab who are really into anatomy. They're the ones who always ask about how things might look fresh, how much force it would take to crack certain bones, which arteries would cause instant death from bleeding out, and so forth. They also break concepts down very easily and use mnemonic devices I can understand, which is useful for exams. However, I have yet to get through a dissection lab without wanting to fervently be somewhere else, because every single time they go at the body parts with gusto like it's a steak and lobster dinner at the fanciest restaurant in New York. It also doesn't help that they fondle the things as they go. FONDLE! The cow heart lab was particularly disturbing on that detail.

I have five more weeks of this class before I'm free to return to the safe world of dietetics and telling people how to eat better. Luckily, no one has offered to have me in a study group, so my personal information is safe from anyone who may decide to observe what *my* innards look like. Also, wish me luck on getting internships, their availability will decide if I can graduate in one more year instead of two!