Guts are gross (and other sundry Anatomy talk)

I know it sounds rather self explanatory, but really, I didn't have a good concept of how gross guts are before we opened the abdominal cavity of our anatomy horses last Tuesday and the cut them out and dug around in them on Wednesday.

The smell was overwhelming. Usually in lab, we get used to the smell by the end of lab. Not that time. Not even a little. It didn't help that some of the horses weren't as well preserved as others, so there were some rotting abdominal contents discovered. (At least ours were well preserved. Actually, they were quite nice.)

Overall, ours wasn't terrible. But all of the steps involving draining intestinal contents were not fun. Not fun at all. Someone had the bright idea to drain our horse's left ventral colon (a relatively early part of the large intestines) by cutting a slit in it, shooting water up it, and then upending it over the floor. It was... nasty... to say the least. It also managed to clog the drain twice, so he had to pull out the drain and dump the catch into the tissue collection bucket.




Then, today, we cut the horse in half. Literally. We took a hack saw to the back, right at the end of the rib cage. We're doing all the pelvic cavity dissection sort of head on. I am forced to wonder, however, how useful a view this is. There will never be any time in anybody's future career in which they will hack a horse in half to go about their procedure.