Serendipity

Don’t get me wrong here, I love biology. And it’s just getting better and better as the days roll by. It’s just, the nastiness of it gets to me sometimes. Let me illustrate my point:

DISSECTION

Not a big deal right? WRONG. I purposely avoided it all throughout high school, and now in college I have no choice. It’s mandatory, and if I don’t like it, I can choose another major. So my first experience dissecting was in a nice, upheld, new lab. I didn’t have to deal with a nasty rat, or pig, or cat. Nope, I got to open up a squid. Pretty cool huh? I thought so, but hey, the smell? Dear Lord, it was absolutely nauseating. But still, pretty cool. I kind of like looking at the organs, seeing the animal, it’s just the JUICE and the SMELL of the animal, when it gets on my notebook, or on my clothes, or (worst of all) IN MY HAIR. Gah. No, just no. I had to take a shower and scrub myself clean after that.

But today was pretty cool, I got up at about 645, to get to lab at 830. This was my second dissection, and I was kind of pumped because we were going to look at sharks! How cool is that? So, I kind of missed the whole rat thing. I heard the last time in lab that they smelled less, so when I walked into lab today and heard “We’re gonna be dissecting rats” I thought, “Well, at least they aren’t too stinky”. Well, the darn rat made up for it in other ways. It was filled with “red dye” that looked like blood, and we had to pour it out on our tray (ew) and change the paper towels underneath it because, it was so messy. I figured I might as well learn, and I asked my lab partner if I could open up the rat. So I did, and he did too. We took turns cutting her open. It was a girl, and she had some weird thing where she was missing her left lung, and her right lung was spotted with white stuff. We think she had lung cancer or something, I thought maybe it was some bacterial thing, which got me worried because I was breathing it in… But what can you do. The professors would guess that last. >.<

So, then we were looking for her left and right ventricle, which are located near (in the area of) the heart. “Odd. Her heart… Wait, isn’t that her heart?” “No, it doesn’t look like a heart. I think it’s right here” “That little thing? Her liver is bigger than that!” “Yeah, I think so.” “So… that’s her heart” “Yeah” I then realized: “Wait. It’s not on her left. Her heart, if that’s her heart, it’s on the wrong side. It’s supposed to be on the left side” I knew this from my cloning and biotechnology class where our teacher taught us that we’ve evolved (very consistently from species to species) that our hearts reside on the left side. So I asked my professor. We’ll at that point we were both bamboozled, so we both asked together.

“Okay, so what is that structure covering the heart?” I looked confused. I had no idea what that spotted thing was. “Think, you have it too” I looked at him blankly. “It’s the lungs. Oh, wait a minute. She’s missing a lung.” I never would have guessed that anyway… Our lungs are in the back, not covering our heart! Then he invited another professor, together surprised, our TA (teaching assistant too). She was the one who noticed the spots on the left lung. The rat also had a mass, and a little bit of the lung above. So it could have been (according to another professor) a developmental error, or cancer. Our professor thought it was cancer, my lab partner and I thought it was a tumor (the mass underneath) and that the rat maybe had some bacterial infection or something nasty with the lungs. Which, again, made me paranoid to be touching it, inhaling it, and getting it’s juice (accidentally) in my hair. Oh well. The things we do for science right?

So that was cool, I was pretty excited to have an interesting rat that the professors were curious to look at. I told my bio lecture teacher, a really sweet lady that likes to do marathons, and is crazy smart. She wanted to see our rat, but I told her we had already bagged her up and put her away. “Okay, I’ll take a look later”. She went back eagerly to her shark.

So, after that, we took a look at a dissected shark. We didn’t dissect anything after that. It’d be too much cleaning and too time consuming. We passed our rat test, naming the parts. We then proceeded to quizzing each other on the shark parts, the frog parts, and the parts of the turtle. Which brought me to an interesting conclusion about life. We are all so similar! We have many organs in common, they look just the same too! It’s just they are in different sizes or in different locations. Each of the animals had a liver, and the shark, boy oh boy, it had a humungous liver. It helps it stay afloat. And let me tell you, the urinary bladder of a rat, is teeny tiny. I was surprised. The insides of a turtle are cool, they look organized, and neat. Unlike that of a frog, which has crazy guts. Its intestines are everywhere. It looks like a hot mess haha. So yeah, it was cool. It’s just it sucks when you can catch something from a dirty rat (no offense Mr. excuse me, Ms. Rat) and it gets all over you. My friend touched the dang rat with his bare hands! AH! So nasty! But, he only touched the tail. He really liked it, said it felt cool lol. Anyways, I think it’s a cool story to tell, and interesting too. I think I’d enjoy so much more if I didn’t have to move around to breathe, hold my breath, and then look at the thing. And be paranoid about cleanliness. Otherwise, I’d love it! 

Wow, that was longer than I expected. :P

-She Dances Love