one week down....

so, i successfully completed my first week of classes. and - wow! hit you in the face. i'm already really behind. it's very overwhelming, but i'm dealing with it pretty well. i think that i've almost found my groove and so should be a little more efficient and focused this week. it's harder to get back into the swing of things than i imagined, having not been a student for 2 years.

wednesday was an odd day. we started our dissections. in one day, i cut into a cadaver and received my own human skeleton to take home. i wasn't very freaked out by this until i got my bone box home. i went to open it and was like "this is a bit creepy". and it still is. i'm sure i'll be utilizing the bones a lot more in the future to study, but for now - they are safely tucked away.

even more surreal perhaps was friday's dissection. the task was the breasts and chest cavity. being that our cadaver is a woman, we had to remove both breasts and give one away to another group who didn't have one. weird. then we had to dissect the individual breast (the part that i ended up doing). it was fine, but it was a little unsettling. here we were, basically doing a type of double mastectomy - a procedure that is upcoming for me in december. of course, it isn't the exact same thing - but as i was thinking about it, it was just..i can't describe it.

i had a similar reaction when we did the spine as i recalled my back surgery. i suppose i've always been fascinated by surgery and things like that, but now, after having actually been part of the process of cutting into a human being, i'm even more amazed by surgeons and surgery. everything is so intimately connected and so close together, it is amazing what we can do. i wish i were more eloquent of a writer or that my thoughts were more coherent at the moment to describe this better.

here's looking to surviving week 2.