A few things come to mind when you hear the words "medical school." You might imagine a student hunched over his or her desk, fastidiously making their way through a thick stack of work. Or maybe you think of an array of predicaments that complement a medical student, from chugging coffee at weird hours to observing rounds in the hospital to reciting the human anatomy like it was Shakespeare. Currently, I have the privilege of doing the latter, reciting the human anatomy like it was Shakespeare or at least attempting to do so. My first day of anatomy was this past Friday, and it was a surreal experience. It's hard to place how grateful I am to those who have donated their bodies to science so that I can learn firsthand how human anatomy comes together. In fact, before my first incision into the body that lay before me, I kept feeling a continuous stream of gratitude that I wasn't entirely sure where to place. I knew that whoever the body that I worked with belong to deserved the fullest from myself and my peers. Our first anatomy unit is in the musculoskeletal system. Our group of six medical students were assigned to find several muscles located right below the skin but right above the spine. It's hard to put into words what I felt when I made my first vertical cut into the cadaver from the occipital protuberance (behind the head) all the way down to the coccyx (tailbone). I was behooved to make sure my cut was just deep enough to get through the layers of skin and subcutaneous fat while preserving the integrity of the muscle we hoped to study that lay just below. As we made progress to finding the various muscles we were assigned, our group found a rhythm that made us a team. We identified the trapezius, the levator scapulae, the rhomboid, the latissimus dorsi, and eventually the spinal accessory nerve. The three-hour session passed in what seemed more like twenty minutes. Sure, anatomy is hard, and I mean really, hard. We've all seen this meme: But the dissections that we are privileged to do remind me that as medical students, we are lucky to learn what we do as a "day job." Sure, we're paying for this opportunity in mountains of money that we don't have, but it's comforting to know that I get to do what amazes me almost every single day. Source
