Anatomy Lab: Head and Neck

As usual, I was super pumped for today because we are able to go back in lab to examine head and neck anatomy. Before this, we spent an hour working on our Healthy Policy research. Today is the last day that we are given in class time to work on this so my group made the best out of our time. We are pretty much done with all the material and now all we need to do is to go through a practice run. I do want to make sure that I have done enough research about the material so that way I am not presenting information that I am not familiar with.

Next, the M2's came to lecture us about head and neck anatomy. There are a lot of muscles, veins, arteries and nerves involved with the head and neck so they did not go too much into detail. Here are some facts that I learned about the anatomy.

• The skull is composed of the frontal, parietal bones, occipital bone, temporal bones, sphenoid bone, ethmoid bone, maxillae, inferior nasal conchae), lacrimal bones, nasal bones, palatine bones , vomer, zygomatic bones, and the mandible

• The neck contains hyoid bone, thyroid gland, parathyroid glands, pharynx and larynx

• The ear is made out of the outer, middle, and inner ear.

The fun stuff happened after lunch, when we were able to head up to the lab. I originally thought that they were going to unmask the identity of the donors to show us this anatomy but they did not. I was relieved in a way. Rather, we were assigned different groups. My group M2 was Ashely and she did a great job explaining all the information. I was able to hold a human brain. It was heavier than I was expecting but Ashley said it might be because of all the fluids that are used to preserve it. I saw all of the lobes and I just could not believe, once again, that, that is inside of us. The cerebellum looked like rolled like rolled yarn and the brain itself felt soft and squishy.

After lab, we were able to reflect on our clinical experiences with Sarah. We went through our best, worst, and most shocking times shadowing. We realized that we do not want to be be the bad doctors that some of us may have observed. We want to be the good ones. Our shadowing experience has taught us who we want to be, where our interests lay, and what doesn't interest us. We gave a round of applause to Sarah at the end for all the hard work that she has done to make our shadowing experiences possible.