From Auld Reekie to the Peaks: Dissection!

So I should probably preface this entry with a warning:

If you have a weak stomach, don't like seeing pictures of dead things, or things with their skin cut off, you probably should avoid the pictures I'm going to show you in this one. I'll put them all at the end of the entry so you can choose not to scroll down that far.

Also, along the same lines, if you don't want to hear graphic details about the dissection.. you might just avoid this entry altogether. :)

Anyway. On to more exciting things. Today started off with two lectures on anatomy which occur just like any other lecture I suppose, except that it's different because it's stuff that you actually want to learn. So while I was tired and just tired of sitting for hours and hours, it was a good lecture, and I learned a lot.

After lectures we trooped across the hall into the dissection room, where we were teamed up into groups of three. My group members were Adam and Jess (not to be confused with Jessica). Both of them were very nice, and after talking to other classmates at the end, it seems we were the most successful at figuring out what was what, and being the first people done.

Our task was to dissect the left forelimb of the dog and discover the extrinsic muscles. So I made the first incision, and promptly made the first mistake, which was not to cut too deep. Oops! But that's alright, it wasn't a big deal, and we moved on. We peeled back the skin from the mid-line of the chest (the ventral medial plane) all the way around the elbow and to the midline of the back (dorsal medial plane). This was a fun task because not only is the outside of the dog particularly gross with formaldehyde and whatnot, but our dog had clearly not been preserved properly, and was growing lovely specimens of green furry mould.

This probably took the longest, so after about an hour of cutting and peeling and cutting and peeling we finally were able to see the muscles. It was actually really neat seeing them like this. In previous classes in high school and college we dissected silly things like frogs and earthworms and sharks and minks, the sort of things that you really wont ever need to know the insides of, so why bother learning, kind of thing, and also everyone besides me is really grossed out by it.

This dissection, though, was amazing because it's a dog, but even more so because I'm FINALLY with a group of people that think that dissecting a dog is the coolest thing in the world!

After the dissection we trooped back into the lecture theatre for a lecture on Agricultural Industry, which was somewhat interesting, but economy and statistics and what have you aren't really my thing, and plus it followed about the coolest class I've ever had, so it couldn't really compare. Bits of it were interesting, I don't want to make it seem like I didn't enjoy it at all, like we learned a bit about trends in agriculture and what causes the trends, but again, it's just not my thing.

So then after that quick lecture we had lunch. So a group of us (Nick, Kyle, Alan, David, Jessica, Anik and I) all went to the little sandwich shop around the corner and discussed our dissections while chowing down on lunch. Only vet students, right?

Anyway, so after lunch we headed up to the Greenfield Suite (GFS), which is a computer lab further up into the city, to look at some histology slides. This part was fun, but a bit confusing, because histology is probably the thing I find hardest, and looking at slides just makes me frustrated and angry. But it was only the first day, and this session was made slightly better by the fact that we were looking at these things on the computer rather than the microscope, which is easier on the eyes.

On the way back from the GFS I stopped into Concom, the certified Apple re-saler, and got a printer and some paper, and then got it home and set it up and realized that the damn thing didn't come with black ink. Who puts these packages together and thinks that people would rather have colored ink than black ink if they're forced to have only one? BLACK! BLACK is what I need and what any other reasonable person would need!

Ahem. Sorry. So tonight we're meeting our "mummies and daddies" who I think are in 3rd year of the 5-year program (or 2nd year GEPs). I have two "mummies" as most people do just because men are a real comodity around here, and they are both from Connecticut! Carin is from Ridgefield and Liz is from Trumbull. I don't think Liz will actually be here until September, but I'll probably meet Carin tonight, which should be fun.

Anyway time for dinner, but here are the pictures I promised! I did warn you!