I enjoyed day 6, the final day, of my cadaver dissection class, doing a variety of things. I spent another couple of hours with the shoulder, really trying to understand the bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments. I enjoyed dissecting a testicle; this is something I've had the urge to do for decades, perhaps due to some latent misandry. The teaching assistant showed me how to remove the fatty tissue of the mesentery, leaving behind a delicate lacey network of blood vessels and nerves. I did that for a little while but found I didn't have patience and interest to do the whole thing. I visited another table and saw a classmate doing similarly with a kidney.
I worked with my teammates to reveal Zinc's spine from the rear. I was amazed to see how tough the material is protecting the posterior portion of the spine. I'd thought it would be easy to take away everything but the bone, but we didn't even get close to that. Likewise, I saw on a different form that the vertebrae and intervertebral disks were covered in very tough material; the disks seemed as hard as the vertebrae. I felt reassured to learn that my own spinal column was so well protected.
My teammates and I then turned Zinc over onto his back so we could dissect the thorax, where we saw that the lungs were quite damaged from Zinc's COPD, and the heart was enlarged. I was surprised to see that the heart was encased in a thick fatty layer and I enjoyed removing that layer to reveal the pericardium (membrane surrounding the heart).
Gil gave us a fascinating detailed dissection demonstration of Zinc's pelvic organs: genitals, prostate, urinary bladder, and rectum. He also did a dissection demonstration of the brain of another form; I only half paid attention to that as I was absorbed with my shoulder dissection, but it was easy to see what he was doing because he had someone train a video camera on the dissection and this was connected to several very large monitors around the room.
As the end of the day drew near, we worked with more abandon, cutting up organs just to see what was inside. In the end, our form, Zinc, was quite dismembered.
I found the whole day fascinating as one body part after another was revealed to me in more detail than I had understood before.
We spent the last 45 minutes putting the remains of each form into a sort of body bag, and the bag into a cardboard coffin that would be transported to a crematorium. We had saved all the tissue we'd dissected away throughout the week in separate bags for each form so that all the tissue could be reunited in the end. We then put all the dissection tables into a star formation, as they had been when we'd arrived on day 1, with flowers and tea candles on each one, and we once again thanked the donors and their families, and one another.
I highly recommend this class for anyone keen to dissect a human cadaver.
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