Anatomy exam

April 1, 2020 | United States | 20-29 years

As background, I'm in my first year of medical school and I get stressed about evaluations of any sort even in non-pandemic circumstances. We've transitioned all of our courses—including our normally scheduled cadaver dissection classes—online to align with physical distancing guidelines. We're now learning anatomy solely through images and prerecorded online cadaver dissections. This is a very different method of learning human anatomy, and is generally acknowledged to be inferior to participating in in-person cadaveric dissection.

One night before an anatomy exam in early April (which we took virtually, from our bedrooms, rather than by identifying cadaveric structures in a lab), I dreamt that for some reason I had convinced myself that the best way to prepare for the exam was to perform dissection and anatomical structure identification on my own body. The exam was on gastrointestinal anatomy; we had to identify various structures and vasculature within the stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, gallbladder, etc. In the dream, I was lying in my bed and had somehow painlessly dissected open my own abdomen and was poking around, attempting to identify my own set of all these structures.

This bizarre thought has become recurrent in both my dreams and my daytime thinking. When professors on Zoom lectures say things like "you can feel your own scapula move as you abduct your arm above your head" or "the medial epicondyle of the humerus is the bony structure of your elbow that you can feel when you go like this," I often experience a knee-jerk (anatomy pun intended) reaction where I think about removing my own bones or organs to be able to examine these structures in three dimensions.