My Own PSA

While the purpose of our second anatomy lab was to practice some typical surgical incisions (ie. the McBurney incision to remove the appendix) and to understand the muscle layers and the body wall, upon beginning to dissect our donor's abdomen I learned something much different. The minute we did an upside down-V-shaped cut underneath the ribs called the Chevron Incision, it was clear our donor's body was abnormal. We noticed that the liver was enlarged, a different (wrong) color, tough, and honestly did not at all look or feel normal. We then began to hypothesize that the reason we could not find the veins and the arteries we were supposed to find in this dissection, that the muscle was too tough to move, and that the organs looked...well, wrong (compared to what we imagine them to look like), was that our donor's ovarian cancer had metastasized to the liver (something our information on the donor could never confirm and something that was a huge surprise to us, despite knowing that ovarian cancer is known to metastasize before being discovered). With this hypothesis confirmed by our surgeon instructors, who actually told us to "move on" as we would not "be able to do this dissection properly", and by viewing the "healthy" anatomy of someone else's donor that we saw in order to "learn" what we were supposed to from this lab, we knew our seemingly content, skinny and easy to dissect through donor, would no longer be a perfect specimen. Instead, her body came to represent deadly pathology, and not, normal anatomy.

When we extended our incision into the abdomen (as instructed), it was clear that the cancer had not only metastasized to the liver, but had spread virtually all over her abdomen. We saw what looked like a distended, greenish, tough part of the colon, which we learned was colon cancer. Then, we found an enlarged mass below the level of the ribs, which knowing bare minimum anatomy we knew was "not supposed to be there" and that really "nothing is supposed to be that hard, that rock solid" in the abdomen. Even still, we found little tiny polyps (which sort of look like hanging tear drops) in bunches all along the wall of the abdomen, and, actually in virtually every space that we could find. Word soon spread to our side of the lab, and to our society members, that we were the "cancer donors" and I had to switch gears into instructor mode to teach everyone "what was wrong" and then, let them learn by feeling it themselves. It was crazy how quickly our donor became not just another person on a lab table who had died and donated her body to science, but instead, was now relegated to being simply a disease.

Yet, even though I happily instructed (and frankly, this was the first time in lab that I did not have that feeling like I had studied the wrong material for the test, as previously people were spitting out terms and definitions...no problem, even though we were told not to study before labs and to learn by doing), it hit close to home to see this case from a gross perspective, as my Great Aunt passed away from Ovarian Cancer. It thus became an almost out of body experience for me to see how bad this cancer was, and to see what it did to ravish the body of my donor (especially since I knew little of the disease). If I learned anything in lab on Friday, it was not the direction of the different layers of the abdominal muscles, or the names of the different surgical instruments and how to suture (oh yes, we were expected to learn by using for the tools--basically a scalpel and like 45 different kinds of scissors-- and to pick up suturing with a 2 minute instruction and then proceed to suture up every incision we made to "better preserve the bodies"), it was that ovarian cancer is a bitch, and one that I hope to never run into in my lifetime. In fact, I write about this to you, well mostly my female readers, as my own PSA, especially since ovarian cancer has pretty unnoticeable symptoms until it has metastasized (which I, and hopefully you, now can visualize). Pay attention to your body, go to the doctor, take care of yourself, and hey, if you are on the fence about having a baby in the future, apparently having one and breast feeding it for at least a year lowers your chances of getting the disease. Let's do my donor justice and learn more than just anatomy from her.