Boxing up the Dead

We wrapped up the first year of school by paying our respects to those who donated their bodies to our program with the Circle of Appreciation.  It consisted of about 15 individuals who represented their dissection group through poems, heart felt speeches and humorous essays.  It was nice to finally learn how others got through this challenging first year of graduate school.  Every emotion was present in the room from sadness to pure joy.  Jim, our anatomy professor, shared a touching poem created by a retired anatomy professor who started the circle of appreciation a few years ago, which was approached from the cadaver's perspective.  It was 100% on par with the experiences we all had in lab this past year.

The whole process of dissecting dead bodies is quite brutal and goes against everything we are taught growing up.  You have to come to grips with death and life, for that matter.  We rationalize the situation by joking or convincing ourselves the person "signed up" for this.  In the end, when all the tests have been taken, we stuck them in a cremation box and sent them off to be burned.  

You take a lot more from experiences like this then you expect.  At times you think you are going to fall apart and other times you feel totally disconnected and completely focused on doing a superb dissection.  It is weird to think it is over and humbling to recall the emotional struggle we had to endure through the endless days in anatomy lab.

The next phase of our education is going to be primarily physiology based and next quarter we will get a dose of pathology as well as our first course in evidence-based medicine.  

All for now