fishballs, cadavers

        I think one lesson I learned today, however oversimplified and cheesy it may be, is that for every miserable moment that med school throws your way, there are little bouts of happiness to be discovered. Today in particular started with a lab exam from hell. And right after that came the lec exam from hell. Both were equally draining and depressing.

        BUT after that, Dr. Banzuela treated all of us in the batch to UNLIMITED FISHBALLS!!! This was our batch's reward for having answered a difficult question during class last week (it was Dustin in particular who answered it, and all of us got to reap the benefits of his effort hahaha). The fishballs did wonders to boost our morale. Look at all these smiling faces!

(Credits to Kamille from whom I did not ask perimssion to post this [hehe sorry])  

      Dr. Banzuela is one of my favorite teachers in ASMPH. I'm not just saying this because of the fishballs! He really make things easier to learn for everybody, giving us helpful mnemonics, holding mini-contests with Starbucks gift certificates as the prize, and injecting fun little stories into the lessons. He's great. He lectuers at San Beda mostly, so we're really lucky to have him.

      After the wonderful fishball gift, we marched off to our next battle: the musculoskeletal module. Dr. Jocson taught us the basics of the anatomical language, explaining important words like superior, inferior, dorsal, lateral, etc. He also set some ground rules for cadaver dissection. My favorite (and often tweeted-about) part was this:

Tang: Doc, are all the cadavers healthy?

Jocson: Well, they're dead.

       We're meeting our cadavers tomorrow, I think, during the mass that's going to be held in their honor. 

       I feel really uneasy about cadavers. I shudder at the thought of slicing open a human body. God, they were people once! Somebody's dad, sister, best friend, worst enemy, life partner. But then they're also lying there on the dissection tables, cold and dead, not giving a single care in the world how you cut them. I know that all they are now is tissue and bone, but it's hard to forget that there used to be blood in those formalin veins, that there used to be words coming from behind their yellowed teeth, that there was once a beating heart where there now lays a cold, dead mass of cardiac muscle.

       My trans group and I were talking about this over some quesadillas and burritos, and Jeff, who has dissected cadavers for college, helped allay my fears. For example: 

Q: How do they smell? 

A: Like formalin. Burn victims smell worse. 

Q: Do they have eyeballs?

A: Yes. 

(Context: I thought that all they had were hollow sockets)

Q: So are they always looking at you?

A: No, naka-pikit sila. 

       I remember when we dissected frogs for Biology lab. I volunteered to pithe the frog for my group, and I had to silence a part of me just to get through the dissection. It was a very cute frog, nice and round and squishy to the touch. I stuck a pin into its neck and pushed down, hard. There was a click, and with some wiggling of the needle, I had soon destroyed its brain. I think cadaver dissection will be the same, silencing that same part of me that protested when I killed that frog.

       Anyway, the dissection starts next week. I'll let you know how it goes (minus the pictures, don't worry).