Warning, this post may be descriptive in a way that you won't really want to have mental images of if you are queasy about dissection as it involves cancerous material....

In the dissection class, the students were starting on the abdominal cavity.
This involves the cutting through the anterior abdominal underneath the rectus sheath, so that four flaps can be reflected back to expose the contents.

After intial observations of the intenstinal contents without touching or moving anything (greater omentum and liver is pretty much all you can see) then they moved onwards to moving without cutting to observer the stomach, spleen, and other structures. Through tracing and picking away of fat they were supposed to identify and describe several structures (coeliac trunk and ganglion if possible, gastic arteries (left,short, epiploic, gastosplenic) ).
For most groups, it was ok, as they worked steadily, and tried to find the structures while most of the groups complained about the amount of fat that their cadavers had....
Well, it wasn't so bad for them all except for 1 group.

Their donor on record died from Renal Failure. As renal failure, essentially their kidneys failed to work properly and filter blood and remove impurities and urine content. It's not the most pleasant way to die, and it would have been a bit of suffering. What was so astonishing was that when we opened the abdominal cavity, their intestinal contents was a mess.

Although they had never had surgery or anything like that, it was essentially mush and completely disarrayed. From observation, it was cancer, and it was discovered that he actually had a melanoma on his pectoralis muscles. But the thoraccic region was completely untouched, indicating that the cancerous cells travelled through the bloodstream into the abdominal cavity before attacking there first, probably as the renal disfunction lowered immune responses in the abdo region.

As they made their observations, the group tried to move the intestines around and that is when things began to go pear shaped.

Due to the state of the intenstines prior to embalming, the embalming, though effective, did not help the intestinal contents stay ...... in a good condition. Parts started to break and flake off.... and then fecal contents began to ooze and so forth. Several of the girls on that group had to leave as they were feeling sick....
After some inspecting, we determined that the contents as they were, were unusable for learning anything. I made the suggestion that if only the peritoneal structures (as it looked that way) were affected by the cancer, then if we removed them, at least they could look at other structures that are still fine, either in the abdominal cavity or retroperitoneal cavity then.
Robin and Laura thought that was a fantastic idea, so we did just that. With lots of pulling, pushing, grunting, squeals of "ewww!, Yuk!" etc as bits of stomach contents, fecal matter and other goo gushing out making a green brown and black concoction in the cavity, some of the girls including Laura, had to stay away or be sick.....

But good did come from it all. After the liver, spleen and small and large intestines, stomach were removed, we could see that the retroperitoneal structures looked far more normal. The Kidneys looked as if there were cysts but that would be expected as they had renal failure.

After closer observations, we could identify the coeliac trunk, abdominal aorta, inferior vena cava and they were in fantastic condition compared to the rest of the contents above them.
However, without making waste and haste, we also examined the contents we removed. Surprisingly, we were able to make use of it too, as all of the structures we were after were still there, and enlarged due to the cancer. Just that without removing the whole lot, we wouldn't have been able to look at them at all without destroying them. And so, they were able to pick away and examine, mesteric aterieres, splenic vein, pancreatics, and gastro arteries as well. Overall, it was quite successful and very different.

Next week for them will be interesting as they won't really be able to do the intestinal work, but they might be able to start on the kidneys and have a good look at their structures.