Dissecting the heart

Today in lab, I spent about 2 hours dissecting out the coronary vessels. It may not sound like a ton of fun, but I liked doing it and time went by very quickly! It is certainly very nice finally having bodies! Dissecting on the heart was a little frustrating because the heart is not very large and likes to roll around a lot, but it went much smoother once I finally got a block of wood to prop it against. Dissecting the blood vessels was also not very easy because they're totally surrounded by very closely associated fat and fascia. It's a little tricky to cut that away without destroying the smaller vessels. But, I got a decent amount of it done in the 2 hours I had. I would up having the L coronary artery, L circumflex, L anterior descending, diagonal, L marginal and posterior descending arteries. I also got the great cardiac vein, carotid sinus, and middle cardiac vein dissected out. If it's not already done when I get back to lab Wednesday, I'll finish up the right side. That side is going to be harder since there's a ton of fat on it!

Now, I'm just wondering what they're going to have us do with the heart. We're supposed to cut it open sometime soon to look at the chambers, but that would definitely not be good for the dissection I did today! If we just keep dissecting everything away, we're not going to have much left for the practical.

Oh, and the TA's did a decent job destroying one of our lungs while they made up the mock. Other people in my group spent a long time and did a good job dissecting out the bronchopulmonary segments, but the lung looks like it's been punted across a football field, at the moment. In their attempts to make the mock a lot harder than the actual practical, they twisted the lung around in all sorts of ways. If we ever run into a patient with a similarly contorted lung, it won't matter if we can identify the structures, because they will be very much dead.

I don't want to blame everything on the TA's and certainly some of them are very good, but this is not the first time they've screwed up a dissection. Some of them have a habit of being way too rough when they're trying to move things away or point something out. The other day, a TA was trying to get to the phrenic nerve (which goes down the side of the heart) and was just basically pulling at it to rip it away from everything else, and didn't seem to notice that he was just squeezing the hell out of the heart in the process.