The human body is messy. Messy and complicated. Doesn't seem like I should have had to spend thousands of dollars and hours of study to learn that, but I did. I may forget specifics like the relation of the lingual artery coursing posterior to the hyoglossus muscle while the hypoglossal nerve passed anteriorly, but I will never forget digging around in the mess of fascia and guts to find one tiny little nerve or artery (never knew it could be so tricky tell the difference between the two in the cadaver!). The school (and I, for that matter) went to tremendous expense to teach me anatomy on an actual human body. The return on that investment is an interesting sort of familiarity with the body that won't soon be forgotten. Spending hours digging through tissue, discovering different parts, struggling to differentiate and identify has taught me more than I could ever learn from the prosected (already dissected to make it easier) bodies in my undergraduate anatomy class. I feel honored to have taken that investment and to have others that invested in me to learn a bit more about the amazing wonders of the body. I trust that the effort I made in my learning will pay off for the people that I treat down the road.
Although anatomy was only one small step in the right direction, working intimately with the body, more intimately than ever before, allowed me to get my hands dirty, literally and figuratively. It was my initiation into the medical field.
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