Thar she blows!

So anatomy was super gross today. We had to remove the guts from the abdominal cavity, all 25 lbs of them. I was on one side of the horse and my partner on the other, both of us cutting the ligaments which connect the guts to the body wall so as to free them. We also tied off both ends in order to keep the contents (read shit) inside. Once most of the top was separated, I came over to the other side and we started to pull them out. I was cutting the last of the ligaments to left the guts fall in a pile into the bag on the floor. So I said, "OK, this is it" and the rest of the guts flew out the sides and down to the floor. My partner failed to tell me that she had punctured the large intestine on her side and as the guts fell out, much of the partially digested partially rotting contents fell all over my leg. Oh man. So, here I was, in the middle of lab, after just screaming when the guts spilled out on to me and with shit covering my leg from knees down, everyone turned to look at me. So that was my day.

To add insult to injury, we still had an hour left of lab and I had no other scrubs to change into. I simply wiped what I could off and continued chopping away. Oh yeah, and our horse is "badly preserved" so it smells particularly bad, which isn't so bad for me since I have almost no sense of smell. When we opened the body cavity, a couple people in my group started gagging and one had to leave the room.

To answer some of the questions in the comments from the last post:

The dogs and cats were donated by their owners from the hospital after euthanasia. The horses however were bought from a dealer on their way to be sold on the meat market. It's sad because they obviously were not taken care of very well (i.e. intestinal parasites). Goats were donated from Genzyme. They were experimental goats that didn't produce the protein that they were engineered to, or something along those lines. I think the llama was a pet that was euthanized and the cow was bought on its way to slaughter.

I get hungry during lab dissections, what can i say? I don't have a problem with uniting what meat I eat and the actual animal. I suppose a lot of people may have a problem with that. You'll never know the work that goes into the packaged meat in the grocery store unless you try for yourself sometime. Plucking chickens is a major pain in the ass.

Nice try at identifying. It's a bad picture, but I did ask for the muscle at D, which is actually the rectus abdominis, or the 'six pack' in human terms. I wish they would ask for something as easy as mesentery... As for the A, B, and C tags, I'm not sure what they are, bad angle. The back hooks go through the tuber coxae, or pelvis to some, and into the strong back muscles. The front hooks (I think) go around the vertebrae and into the big muscles. I'm not sure on the front since we are told not to cut around the hooks cuz the horse will fall on us. It must go through bone though. Yea, my lab partner reminds me a lot of you (the girl I told you about a while ago). She knows about horsemeat and things like that. She as telling us today horror stories of how they kill dogs for food in parts of Asia, not pleasant, lemme tell you. She's like "Debbie Downer" the SNL skit, if you've seen it. He he.

Ok. I've written enough. Enjoy your weekend everyone!