Donor Lab
CW: Discussion of Human Dissection
What is donor lab?
You’ve probably heard this called cadaver lab or cadaver dissection. My professor for anatomy will use the word cadaver when they’re telling a story from their days in school or near the beginning of their career. In our class, we use the term donor, we refer to our donors by their name, and we keep any part of the body we’re not actively working on covered to respect their privacy. At the end of the course, we will hold a memorial service in their honor. In years past, students would create a small item to keep in our memorial case. There are things like paintings, signed hats, certificates from donations to associations, and poems in the case at the moment. Last year, our program switched over to a living memorial and started with planting 3 trees. I’m looking forward to watching it grow and to adding our own contribution. I’m not sure how other professional medical programs run this part of their curriculum but I love that ours is so respectful to the people that donated and their families.
Do students enjoy this class?
Some students are eager to participate in this lab, some are simply unbothered, and others don’t want to do anything more than just look. Fortunately, my professor doesn’t encourage anyone to do anything they’re not comfortable with. There are 6 students assigned to each donor so we’re not doing this on our own and my group has a pretty good mix of the more and less enthusiastic. You’re welcome to take a guess at which one I am in the comments!
Some of the more exciting things we’ve done include using bone saws, finding remnants of older style surgeries, finding anatomical abnormalities, and using rib cutters. If you are an expert in historical surgeries, please let me know! There is one object we found that no one can identify, including our instructor.
Image is my own.
Do you do anything special to stay safe?
To work in the lab, we need to wear goggles (even if you already wear glasses), masks, gloves, white lab coats, and clothing and shoes you don’t care too much about. One day, we had a fire drill in the middle of anatomy lab. We disposed of our dirty gloves but otherwise left the building as is. I think we might have gotten a few interesting looks from the nursing students on the other side of the parking lot. All of the students are really great at keeping their space clean and taking care of the tools and other things they use.
Taking a moment to rewind, you might remember that I’m a graduate assistant (GA). Each GA is assigned a professor to primarily work with and mine is the anatomy professor, which I love. This means I get extra duties like making sure cleaning fluids are filled, organizing sign ups, taking care of hazardous waste, and giving tours to students from other departments.
Is this a difficult class?
With 18 credit hours this semester, every class is difficult! The level of anatomy we’re required to know is pretty intense but it could be worse. We only need to know the basics for abdominal organs but muscles and bones we need to know very intimately. Nerves and blood vessels are somewhere inbetween. If someone specializes in a particular field of PT, they will probably know these structures in more detail.
