Day Two

Woooo – The Thai food I picked up for lunch was spicier than I expected it to be. My choice of beverage was limited when I got home too – water (which would inevitably spread the spice and cause additional pain) or red wine (better for dulling senses of course). The choice was obvious, and the rest of the Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon was consumed. It made me feel great but I’ll admit my focus is off and thus, while I regain my full senses, I write a quick blurb about day two before heading into the lab to review the thoracic cavity.

Day two – After a short break for Independence Day, it was back to the grindstone. Well, more hand chisels and hammers really. That’s right folks, in order to see a spinal cord, you need to remove the ‘spine’, and there is no better way to do that than with good ol’fashioned elbow grease. So on day two, we hacked through the backbone... With careful force applied to a chisel precisely placed on the arches of five vertebrae *cough*, my group performed a laminectomy – well, at least that was our intention; to remove the top of the neural arches to see within the vertebral canal to the spinal cord. My group received different suggestions about where to cut from the different instructors circling our table and we sorta 'missed' the target. Fortunately, we undershot rather than over shot and removed the top most part (spine proper), so we were able to clear away more and see got a bird’s eye view of the spinal cord, i.e., fricken rad afternoon.

Day two made me say, thank goodness I am a researcher and have no plans to be a surgeon – I’m too clunky and I like to take things apart a lot before putting them back together. Thus, I will stick to the specimens that no longer require active neurons to be informative.