Day Three

We flipped the bodies over on day three. ‘P’ is a large person so this required skill and grace. With six of us counting to three, we had success. Once supine, it was revealed certainly that we were learning from a woman. As I carefully remove the skin from her pectoral region the group wanted to name her. “How about Penny?” I said, now intimate with the facia over her ribcage. “I like that,” said another. “Penny she is then.”

The pectoral region was pretty dull to start with. Not many muscles of great interest. Her breasts were asymmetrical and there was a definite distortion in her left one. We split that down the center to reveal the mystery behind what makes a boob. Straight through the nipple and the areola, then through sinuses and ducts, past shriveled mammary glands now replaced by fat, our cross section was a success and served as a teaching specimen for several other groups. It’s not as ‘magical’ as I thought it would be. It really just looks like a lot of fat tissue. Apparently on younger women, there is less fatty tissue and the suspensory ligaments weaving throughout are more taught keeping the weight of the fats and glands ‘up’ – I commented how in a few years, anatomy students will most certainly begin to encounter big bags of saline instead of real breasts.

After getting through all the superficial stuff, we started tracing arteries. I am not sure that any of us competed the reading for that days lab, so when the professor assigned to our table came over and started rattling things off, we were less than impressive. In case you were wondering though, the axillary artery is a continuation of the subclavian. Off of the axillary branches a small trunk called the thoraco-acromian artery which in turn gives off four other arteries we are not responsible to identify on the practical, though we can now. The professor worked out the relationships of veins, nerves, and arteries for us on the left shoulder and I got to work on the right. We had a bit of a head start there, because Penny had a port in her right shoulder with a tube going into her cephalic vein continuing into the right brachicephalic vein. Deep to the veins should have been arteries, but I had trouble clearing away the tissue – I had an idea! I grabbed a trash bag and threw in over my shoulder, letting it hang down over my chest. Then, I grabbed Penny’s right arm and propped it up against me – hand waved in the air, Penny was poised for a new view into her pectoral vessels.

The port in her veins and the distorted breast tissue got us hypothesizing about her cause of death. We began to suspect cancer but we still weren't sure.