Gross Anatomy

Gross Anatomy lab started this week. At Berkeley and I think most undergrad classes, there were different sections, days, and times for labs but here, we're ALL in lab at the same time. Tuesdays and Thursdays from now on are going to be SO crazy because after lunch there's usually Gross Anatomy lecture then proceeding that all 189 or so of us trek up to the 7th floor locker room to prep for lab. That intermission time is CRAZY! First--the locker room. There are about four rows of lockers in the "coed" section and then a couple more rows in each of the smaller side rooms (split off by gender). But most of us have lockers in the coed section so I always see guys in their boxers changing into their scrubs. Some girls even just change in that center coed section but many also step into the side rooms to change before storing back our stuff in the lockers. It's sheer chaos, especially since everyone's in a hurry to get to their cadavers.

Then across the hall is the big dissection rooms which reek of formaldehyde (interestingly enough, it makes you hungry). We're assigned into groups of 6 so there are roughly about 30 cadavers, all lying in their body bags atop these metal cases. It can get tedious plowing through all the fat (and there's an incredible amount of it) and then searching for nerves and vessels that all seem to look the same but at the same time, it's really fun. While my other classes are straight from the book learning, gross gets very hands on and our Professor also rocks. Yay med school!