Week 11: Emotions Revealed - Anatomy Begins

I scrubbed in on Monday morning to end my four day weekend a little earlier to observe another spinal surgery. I had a chance this time to watch the L5-S1 fusion from start to finish as the case went about 4 hours from first incision to last suture. They went in anteriorly through the abdomen and exposed the vertebral bodies, scraping the out the herniated vertebral disc, added a bone graft, a titanium plate, and six screws before closing the patient back up. I got a front row seat scrubbed in and got to play around with the mushy vertebral disc when it was taken out. By the end of the week with the start of gross anatomy I would learn that I was mashing up nucleus pulposus and annulus fibrosus of the vertebral disc.

Anatomy started early on Wednesday, skipped Thursday, and continued Friday as we substituted two days out of this selective for Friends and Family weekend over the weekend of October 11-12. With anatomy beginning the fun began as we were introduced to our cadavers on Wednesday and the same day began dissection on the back - with that the fun of learning muscles, nerves, insertions, origins, etc. began [in retrospect: what we thought was nigh impossible to learn in these first two days of anatomy would prove at the end of six weeks leaps and bounds easier than our final week and a half of anatomy trying to learn head and neck and lower limb in seven days]. Being sensitive to the nature of our dissections, the donors privacy and also confidentiality I will not divulge in any details or specifics regarding our cadaver or procedures, but for those of you who are truly interested in what we are doing, you can take a look at the University of Wisconsin anatomy site for anatomical dissection videos that will give you a first person perspective of what we did in the anatomy lab.

We ended the week with a training workshop by the Ekman Group that was paid for by the medical school. The Ekman Group is a team of specialists trained in facial recognition that works with security agencies worldwide and trains personnel in the technique of facial expression recognition and micro expressions. Purported to be more accurate than polygraph, facial expressions are hard to unlearn and retrain - especially micro expressions that only last fractions of a second - but when picked up by experts can be far more revealing that any other means. We looked at footage from the O.J. Simpson trial, various CEO TV interviews before secret corporate corruption was exposed and saw how micro expressions of contempt and disgust were long in existence despite their cheerful faces. It was an interesting seminar and as we trained, it hopefully helped us learn to analyze our patient contact better in hopes of better ascertaining hidden concerns. I thought it was some pretty hi-tech stuff that I sure didn't anticipate learning in medical school to say the least.