dissection and life...

Listening to: Keith Urban's Tonight I Wanna Cry (the perfect song for the gloomy Melbournian weather)

Reading: my PBS notes on visceral systems

Eating: nothing

Drinking: My favourite green tea (i can drink this forever)

wow, the 1st week back after Easter has been crazy!! so much to do, so many people to see, so many places to go, so little time!!

1st off, i had my 1st dissection class and boy, was it interesting! we got this cool surgical intern guy at RMH as our tutor and thank goodness! he was really good man. and he answered all our stupid, anooying questions with teh patience of a grandmother. and he is BUFF!! HUGE BICEPS AND TRICEPS!! and totally built!! geez, where does he get the time off to body build man??!! aren't surgical interns supposed to be the busiest of the lot??!! oh well, into the bodies then... so yes, i had my 1st exposure to a dead body!! yayness! and we got this old fat dude who died of complications of diabetes and i do mean COMPLICATIONS!! he had like gangrene (toes of both feet amputated), heart diseases (metal plates in his aorta) and liver problems (he had numerous operations at the abdomen area)... and his tummy was HUGE, probably due to alcohol and unhealthy diet... suddenly, looking at him and all his problems makes me determined that i will never ever let any of my close friends or family members ever end up like him, unhealthy and probably unhappy from all the health problems he has... so people, take care of yourself... coz the cadaver that I saw did not look pretty at all and he did suffer ALOT... really hits home that health is really more important than anything else...

but let's rewind abit... so when i first walked into the dissection lab, all i could see was rows and rows of cadavers covered by white clothes and the smell was unmistakably of embalming fluids and it was cold in there. so yes, i admit that i was kinda scared at that particular moment. but in like 5 minutes, as i stood there like phey yee and jacq and lun, it went away. it sort of felt that i was meant to be there and nothing can change that and the sooner that i got over the stupid irrational emotion, the better off i'll be.... but that's not to say that i did not feel the pang of pity and empathy i felt for the poor guy the moment they lifted the cover sheet. the feeling when i first looked into his face was undescribable. i will never ever forget the fleeting emotion. it's hard to describe.

a mixture of sadness, pity squeezing at my heart.... i think.... and probably a bit of disgust and fear... coz like i said before, death is never a pretty sight...

but the show had to go on... so we had a look at various X rays and then a severed lower limb with the thorax region....

after the dissection class, i was walking back with phey yee and we were talking about how we felt so much like medical students now once we had our 1st taste of cadavers and death and how human we were still going to be even after countless encounters with death and patients. coz after all, the human tough is what all doctors need, in my opinion, to be a healer and carer of the sick. knowledge and information is good, but definitely not enough to make your patient feel like they can put their lives in your hands. coz that's what you have in your hands. the lives of a thousand people....

and then, there's an exam next monday to test my knowledge so far and i'm still not feeling particularly confident about it so now back to mugging and studying about visceral systems...