Tales of a Nursing Student

Last week and tomorrow in my A&P lab, we are doing a thorough dissection of a rat, looking at all of the various systems (muscular, digestive, urinary, reproductive etc.)

 

I really wasn’t looking forward to these two weeks. For one thing, formaldehyde makes me cry, just like onion. For another, we had been warned of both pregnant rats (and we later discovered that it was a very needed warning.) Yuck!!

 

Tuesday morning of last week broke bright and early and I got to my lab by 7:30. After a brief explanation of how to skin our poor rat, we went up to the front to get our rat.

 

In order for the rats to fit in our dissection pan comfortably, we have to cut off the tail. (It also really helped the squeamish factor. My lab partner and I were very thankful to see our tail go.) Tomorrow, after we finish dissecting our rats, we will have a competition for the best rat name. I think formaldehyde does something to our brains because nobody in our lab could think of a good name (Stuart and Templeton were both thrown around, but most of our rats were female.) I thought it would be fun to make up a story about our rat, about why she was so much smaller than the others, but we couldn’t make up one of those either.

 

Skinning the rat turned out to be no pleasant job because the connective tissue held firm.

But it was amazing to see how the muscles overlapped and looked like one giant muscle with fibers going in different directions. Also, every organ that we saw was beautifully and wonderfully made (even in a rat!) One of the coolest things was the pancreas, which did not have a firm structure and looked like cottage cheese. Anyway, it was not quite as bad as I anticipated it to be, but I'm still not looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the dissection. By the way, did you know that rats have no gallbladder and no appendix?

 

Right now, my nameless, tailless, and taleless, rat is sitting, wrapped in a damp chuck, in my lab desk drawer waiting for me to come and cut her up some more. If you have any good ideas for names, suggest away. She was a black/white, small rat who had yellow teeth, was only slightly pregnant, and didn’t want to be skinned at all!

In my ethics class we have been studying ethics around how we treat the land. Today my TA was wondering out loud if it were morally wrong to eat a tomato that had been flown in from Mexico during the winter because of all the green house gas emissions that were produced in transportation. That made me think of one of my nutty customers at Bloomingfoods last summer. She was at the salad bar, and demanded,

“Why aren’t these greens organic!!?”

“Well, they actually are. But because they are grown locally and not certified, we can’t sell them as organic.”

Then she exploded.

“I don’t care if we have to kill the whole state of California!! You NEED to see organic greens here.”

So much for supporting the local community…

My A&P lab, which starts at 7:30 every Tuesday, way too early to be dissecting, poking etc., is usually interesting. It is especially when the TAs preface it with tips on how to help a fainting friend, or people who are squeamish at the sight of blood.

This morning, it was warm enough to ride my bike to campus for the first time all year! So I got to Lily in about 10 minutes as opposed to the 25-30 it usually takes me to walk there. It was great! But my tea was hotter than normal, and I completely forgot about its presence in my backpack, so when I bent over by bike to lock it up, I got soaked with nice smelling hot water. Ouch! And the Brrr. Oops.

Then I went into my lab and watched the coordinator set up lots of sharp boxes and “incinerator” boxes for biohazard materials. This was going to be exciting! Then our TAs arrived and started talking about what to do if one of us started fainting. Really? Who would really faint at the sight of blood? And it would be only the sight of blood because not everyone had to get stuck.

So we started out lab, collecting about half of the student’s blood, and then someone went down! Not all the way down to the floor, but far enough down. The excitement started. The TAs started calling for emergency personal to come and the first police man who came was on his bike. He road it to the basement of the Biology building!! The next half hour or so was spent trying to revive and stabilize the girl, until all the blood was put away and cleaned up.

It was a nice way to wake up this morning, and when I was fully awake, I realized that it wasn’t a dream. I just hope that student who fainted wasn’t a nursing student. There should be some way to test whether girls will faint at the sight of blood before they are allowed into the nursing school. =)

This morning one of my roommates and I went to the Greek Orthodox church on a field trip. It was one of the most interesting, albeit strange, experiences I’ve had in a while.

We walked into a room hazy with the smoke of incense (which in Revelation symbolizes the prayers of the saints) and covered in icons and images of various saints. It was interesting, having just studied many artists who created work like that which was on the wall, like Giotto and Duccio. But these pictures weren’t in the context of art class, but rather in the context of real people venerating them. According to one of the women who was explaining the liturgy to Bonnie and I, veneration manifests itself by them kissing the picture. At other times in the liturgy, they bowed to both a metal cross flanked by two fans and the priest and the center picture of the crucifixion. At other times in the liturgy, the deacon cleansed the room (and in doing so, he cleansed the people of their sins) with a censer on a chain, increasing the smoke in the room.

There was a very clear liturgy that they followed (that of St. Basil the great, I think, which was 53 pages) including much chanting and murmuring. It seemed clear that they thought the power was in the liturgy and not the actual words. Another interesting part of the Greek Orthodox church is that they celebrate pedo-communion. Their tradition is that after an infant is baptized, for three weeks the father holds a candle during the liturgy in remembrance. After those three weeks are over, that child is a communicant member and can partake of the Lord’s Supper.

 

I’m sure there were other parts of it that I’m forgetting, but overall it was a fascinating, kind of scary, and very informative field trip… But I don’t really want to go back any time soon.