Days Eleven and Twelve: The Pelvis

To start day eleven, we had to split the body in half through the pelvis. The instruction manual said to “start at the right of the clitoris and stay to the right going through the vulva." It was me, 3 other girls, and 1 guy. I start cutting and was like "where do i go next?" the girls were all "where's the vulva?" Under one girls breath I hear "My mirror stays in the drawer." And who knows -- maybe the guy just didn't know what he was looking at before then... After we got over the laughing, I decided to walk over to another table to see what they did. There was a young looking guy there and he said, "well we cut kinda wrong. cuz we went to far away from the cli... -- I can't say that word" and he turned beat red and started giggling. I looked at him and said "Cli-to-ris?" i told the group to make him say it seven times out loud. Lots of blushing that day by the young men in that class. Well, after satisfactorily determining where to cut, I made a nice bisection through the right crus of the clitoris, the anterior and posterior walls of the vagina and stopped just before the anus and rectum, cuz it was still full. BUT – one of the professors, my new hero came over and wiped her clean and we proceeded to examine the rest of the urogenital organs.

On day twelve we discovered that Penny’s cancer must have spread. She was missing her right ovary and there were hundreds of small cell masses surrounding her uterus and body wall all the way up to her diaphragm and ribs. We therefore worked on her left side for once. I forgot to not that during work on the abdomen, we bisected her kidneys. The left kidney was only half the side of her right and this was on par with the missing left lung and asymmetric body thus far). The ovary was pretty cool – surrounded by scar tissue for decades of ovulation. Her fallopian tubes were small and sinuous and her uterus was normal (about the size of a hockey puck – don’t get me started on what it expands to during pregnancy).

I learned this region pretty well and spent the remainder of the lab teaching other people this system because EVERYBODY came to our table to view the female urogenital system. I was exhausted by the end but new the va-j-j and friends so well that I described them again during the weekend review session – a student called me the TA in front of the professor actually holding the review. SWEET! Later that night, my mom got a KICK out of me describing this to her, especially when I said I told people to pinch the clitoris between their fingers so they could find it and said “Here it is!” I’m glad she has an open mind and doesn’t freak out when I say things like “find the clitoris.”