Well, Merry Christmas, folks. I know it’s still only Christmas Eve, but frankly I doubt I’ll be getting to the blog tomorrow (I mean, lets be real here. I don’t have anything to write about for the next two weeks, since all I’m doing is sitting around reading Narnia and getting fat on fudge and toffee. My life is far from interesting… and I LIKE it that way).

So, Merry Xmas. Enjoy the holiday of enforced spending. Bah. Humbug.

But seriously… merry christmas. Or happy holidays if PC floats your boat. Oh, and thanks mom and dad for the new tires. They handle great.

Raise your hand if you’ve performed a pelvic exam today. Scrubbed in on surgery? Ok, now raise your hand if you’ve felt someone’s aorta pulsing in between your fingers in someone’s peritoneal cavity. No? How about cut a suture?

How about CLAMP, STAPLE, AND SEVER SOMEONE’S SMALL BOWEL? Read on, dear readers.

I went in to see surgery today with my dad, who was assisting another doctor here in town with an ovarian tumor debulking. The woman’s tumor had metastasized all over her abdominal cavity, so the first order of business was to cut off her greater omentum, which is a loose apron of fatty tissue that hangs from your stomach. Her omentum was chock full of fibrous, nasty tumor. Unfortunately, the omentum also carries the blood supply to the stomach, so cutting it away involved meticulously clamping every single tiny artery, cutting them, and then tying them off. The surgery took the greater part of 3 1/2 hours.

Anyhow, the attending was really awesome about letting me be around. First off, he had me do a pelvic on the woman so I could feel the cancer through the vaginal wall, and then as he was performing the surgery, talked me through basically everything he was doing- all the anatomy, the techniques, everything. By far and away the coolest part was when he used a tool that allows you to staple two 4″ lines next to each other while simultaneously cutting down the middle. Essentially, you put a loop of small intestine in it, zip the tool along, and you are left with two severed, perfectly closed ends of intestine.

The tool is pretty easy to use though… so once he had gotten it into place he let me grab the handle and zip it through the bowel. Maybe I exaggerated before about how much I actually did (probably best, since it was surgery on a live person, and I am, in fact, just a 1st year medical student). But, my hands didn’t shake at all.

It was pretty much amazing- and at the same time, it got really boring at points. Once he had sutured the 12th small vessel leading from the stomach (and was still only halfway to cutting off the omentum) I was ready for something new. There’s only so many vessels you can watch ligated and still be interested. ‘Course, watching the small bowel part was amazing, and I wasn’t the one doing the work… that could be a big part of it. They have to do some really nifty tricks to get the small intestine hooked back up to the large intestine after a resection.

Surgery may still be in the cards for me- seeing all the anatomy I had just learned in such vibrant color was incredible… I really enjoyed it. Of course, it’d be more fun if I were the one holding the scalpel :-) Some day, perhaps.

So, finals are over, and I’ve been sitting around like a bum for the last couple days, cleaning the house, sleeping my life away, and generally feeling like I deserve to do absolutely nothing. I know school is going to come all too quickly… 3 weeks is nothing, really. I’ll be reading as many books and lying on as many couches as humanly possible before the start of next semester.

In other news, check out the “friends” pages on the right. I’m trying to put up pictures and little blurbs of as many people as I can, so that I can do stuff like this –> TJ is off in Michigan visiting extended family for the break, so I’ve got the house to myself, though Peas is still in town. If you feel like you should be on the roster and I don’t already have you up, shoot me a line.

I can’t help but be totally excited for these next 4 days. It’s like all the studying, all the hours that we’ve put in, are finally coming to fruition. God… the countless hours spent in lab, library, study rooms. Coming out of the library to find dark already fallen. Friendships strained by close quarters, difficult material, constant togetherness. And then suddenly, here are the tests. It’s all worth it. No more anatomy. You knew that being kicked in the posterior 10th rib on the left side is likely to damage the spleen. And frankly, right now? For me, that’s all that matters. I did it. I feel validated. Its an emotional rollercoaster and right now I’m on a high.

Also, I said my goodbye to my cadaver today during the practical. You’d think it’s wierd that you get so personally attached to a dead body, but our guy (he never had a name, though Court and I called him “Charlie” occasionally in reference to Lost)… well, he may not have known it, but there was a connection between us. I knew, for example, that he had an aortic aneurysm. He probably never would have had any symptoms from it, but it was still there. He also had polycystic kidney disease- also asymptomatic. He had the best thoracic duct of all the cadavers (usually the thoracic duct is extremly tiny and hard to see, but his was big and beefy) in lab. And when I came to our cadaver station during the practical? I smiled to see how beautifully they had cleaned up the structure we needed to ID (crus of the penis! I’ll call it beautiful, because frankly, it was. And, furthermore, it took FOREVER to understand where it was in relation to everything else. I’d say we spent about an hour and a half trying to dig it out).

*chuckle* watch me wax nostalgic over body parts. Seems kind of silly, I suppose, but then again, I spent hours and hours cutting, cleaning, understanding. I suppose at some point it didn’t even matter- we don’t get graded on dissections or on quality, so there technically no “point” to doing a good job. Still… I’m going to miss him. It’s almost indescribable how important I think that cadaver lab was for me. I’m so spatial; getting rid of 3-d bodies would kill me. I know a lot of medical schools are switching over to prosections (dissections performed by professionals) rather than student-based dissections. I think that’s a mistake. When Sarah sliced through Tom’s beautifully cleaned off facial artery? Yeah, we’ll never forget where the facial artery is again. Ever.

Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever told that story, and it’s pretty funny, so I should before I forget it. I also plan on uploading a couple pictures of the people I spend most of my time with so you can put a face to the names. I think it’s high time that I start using names. This will happen during the break when I have nothing better to do.

Anywho. The facial artery is very twisty (rather like cooked spiral macaroni) so that it can stretch when you turn your head without breaking. Courtney had spent 30 minutes or so cleaning it off on our side. It was beautiful. Tom then proceeded to try to clean his off (as, naturally, there is a bit of friendly competition between med students… you didn’t think it was all gone, did you?) just as nicely as Courtney had. Clean, clean, clean. Looks pretty good. He turns his back for a few seconds, and Sarah goes to help out a bit… unfortunately, she had a new scalpel blade.

*snick* *boiiiing*

There goes Tom’s facial artery. Note to self. Sharp scalpels cut through arteries much better than dull ones. Tom was piiiiiiissed.

Anyway, back to my waxing nostalgic about cutting into bodies. Thanks Charlie, for all your help.

I’ll miss you. Thanks. A thousand times over.

Good luck everyone!

On a more sober note, statistics say that some of our classmates won’t be coming back after this round of tests. That’s a scary thought. I really, really like my classmates. It would be very sad to see any of them go. Morbid much, Zac? Why are you focusing on failing right now?