today = best day in lab so far.

or at least pretty far up there.  so today we learned the skull... and then basically there wasn't much to do in lab, they said we could start taking the skin of the face if we wanted to get a head start and we could check out the brains if we wanted -- which are sitting in buckets in the back of the lab.  each cadaver has already had an incision made around it's skull and it's brain was taken out before we even saw the cadavers.  except... gwen!  so we thought it was done, because her scalp was definitely sawed around her head, but we were wrong!

so i pulled her scalp forward over her face (gross, i know) and we were going to take her skull cap off... which should have more or less just lifted off like everyone else's... all clean and whatnot.  and we can't find the incision!  our skull is still completely in tact!  (shock and awe)  so... remember how i told you that gwen had all this trauma... and definite head trauma/surgery -- staples up the side of her scalp.  ok, so under those staples, on the outside of her skull -- massive clotting.  so much blood.  under that -- we think she fractured her skull around her pterion -- point where a bunch of the sutures come together, right around your temple -- weakest part of the skull (we learned this today, fittingly).  so, apparently they didn't take her brain out, because they figured it was probably too messed up anyway and wouldn't be good as far as structure and whatnot.  so what did we do?  we took it out!  i got to use the bone saw to saw around her skull (so much harder than you would think! it was a thick one) and then we chiseled the cap of her skull off to reveal -- BRAIN!  hurray!  she also had a fairly neatly sawn out circular piece of her skull where i guess they tried to do rapid brain surgery to repair her either epidural or subdural hematoma (it was difficult to tell -- but we learned about those today too, fittingly).  they didn't put the piece back very well, so i'm guessing it wasn't looking good from that point on, although they did put in a nice little metal piece to keep the little bone window attached to the skull.  

anyway.  so skull cap off.  and we can see the brain!  it was excellent.  okay, i guess thats not true.  really, the brain sucked.  the anatomy professor came over and said "yeup, the technical term for that is what we call 'brain pudding'" -- nice, right?  :P  but yeah so pretty  much the outer portion of the brain was fairly intact... but the inner portion was pretty much moosh.  it was pretty sweet to be able to dig through it through and look at the structures that we could see, not to mention to be able to see what the actual trauma caused and whatnot.  

the smell was horrible.  it was mainly from the bone saw kind of burning through the skull and all the bone dust in the air... but all in all, an excellent day in lab.