Cadaver Lab!!

Hey hey hey! I just got back from the cadaver lab!! It was amazing!! Absolutely amazing! How can you not believe there is a God when you see how amazing our human bodies are!?! I don’t know!

So I’ll start at the beginning!

We get to the NAU health sciences building and go up to the 2^nd floor where the cadaver lab is. It’s not marked or anything.. it’s pretty low key.. they don’t tell a lot of people about it. Anyway we get there and our instructor, Dr. Leahman, explains that there are 6 bodies for us to look at AND if we feel nauseous at any time to let him know!

After that little chat we’re all nervous but we get gloves and goggles on and in we go. At first I panicked! The room was just a normal old classroom but had tables with partially covered bodies. It was not what I expected and the smell was SO over powering. The freakiest part for me was that the bodies still had skin on their hands and feet. Some of the female bodies even had painted toenails and fingernails. It was real! Real loved people; grandmas, grandpas, sisters, and brothers! Once I got over the shock of seeing all the bodies and started actually pointing out the organs and finding arteries, veins, bones and muscles I had been learning about it started to be an awesome experience!

All the bodies had a sheet of paper stating what they died from and how old they were. Once person had died from lung cancer and we got to look and see the breakdown of tissue and how the alveoli would have been completely destroyed. A lot of the bodies had been smokers and all of their lungs had black lines all through them, so sad that a lot of people don’t even know the damage they are doing to their lungs.

There were so many different things to look at: A knee replacement, a pacemaker still in the heart that was attached to the SA node, the valves in the heart, the kidney’s the gallbladder, the BRAIN (I held a whole human brain in my hands!!!), everything!

The body is so amazing!

We had a little old lady that had died at the age of 91 years old. Her lungs and heart still looked perfect compared to the other overweight and smoking bodies. It just really taught me the importance of the things we put in our body and how much it affect us! Gaining weight has to be the worst thing you can possibly do! The fat gets intertwined in everything, and it’s gross! I have seen it! One of our bodies was obese and it was just massive amounts of yellow fat. And all of his inners were just being squished and ugg.. not a pretty sight! Anyway, very eye opening experience of how much more you’ll get our of your body when you’re healthy! =)

Anyway it was amazing! I’m so thankful I can have these opportunities to learn about the human body and do it by hands on stuff! Learning from our textbooks is important but I learn the most while doing hands on stuff! I will never forget what those bodies looked like or how the organs felt. Amazing! I really REALLY want to go to body worlds now! Where they have all those cadavers.. you know what I’m talking about? Well it’s in phoenix now and I really want to go!! We’ll see! Maybe this summer!!