Wasn't expecting this...

So now I'm a 3rd-week medical student! We've finished our dissection off the lower extremity (which was a heck of a lot more complicated than I originally exected!) and have moved on to the thorax. On thursday we opened the chest cavity and on friday we dissected out the lungs! Very very exciting!

Except for two things. To get to the thoracic cavity you need to remove the ribs. I anticipated using special medical tools for the dissetion.... thinking that speical instruments were going to be provided to saw through the ribs and sternum. Nope! Each group was handed a hand-saw from the 1950s for the big bones and a wire-cutter for the smaller sections of the ribs.

Then, to our surprise, 2/3rds of the left lung of our human cadaver was missing, and in its place was a goo-of-sorts. To the best of our ability, me and the other first-years in my group couldn't find a reasonable explanation for the missing lung, because there was no scare tissue that would indicate it was intentionally cut out. Our cadaver died of bladder cancer (age 88). Our professor says that its common for invasive cancers to spread, and in this case to the lungs. At which point, the lung may have destroyed itself in the process of trying to destroy the invading cancerous bladder tissue, leaving behind the goop that we found!

I thought that was interesting, and had never heard of anything like it. The goo was pretty gross looking, and we had to scoop it out with our hands and put it in plastic cups for testing. Yuck!