A&P Lab ?

I'm with you! I hope to be taking A&P in the fall too and I'm a little nervous about dissecting an animal.....I hear it's usuallly a cat.

I think all A&P classes are somewhat different, depending on the school and instructor, but I'm in A&P II right now and no dissecting cats, which is good since I'm a cat lover and wouldn't do it...lol. We have dissected a fetal pig, a sheep heart, and sheep brain. Otherwise, we have tested our own blood and urine, learned to take blood pressure (well, tried to do it, but only had a couple of attempts each), etc. There is usually only one person dissecting at a time and many don't do the cutting at all. It is actually quite fascinating as you get to see all the veins, arteries, organs, etc. Plus, it is all pretty tidy, so nothing too nasty. The worst thing in A&P lab is the smell of the solution used to clean the tables and such. That nasty stuff will make your eyes tear up...lol. Good luck :)

Dissections really aren't that bad. The worst part was probably the smell, but you'll get over it pretty quickly.

Dissections were fun for me. We dissected rats in general biology, a sheep brain, heart, and eye in A&P I, and we did a sheep heart and a cat in A&P II.

I LOVED dissections! We dissected quite a few things, the main one being a cat. Believe me, I am a cat person, I have three cats, and I got through it just fine. The smell is quite disturbing though, and it takes some getting used to.

Usually you start off by taking the fur and skin off, then all the fat deposits, and then identify all the muscles, then go deeper to the organ systems. It's really neat, in my opinion. My cat had kittens still inside, so that was awesome to see too.

Don't be worried, its an awesome learning experience. And it's not all you'll do, as someone else had mentioned.

I just finished A&P2! :) The first night of lab in A&P1 we did a cat, which I hated! Then right up to the end of A&P2 we did cadavers. Which was weird at first but you quickly forget that it's a human. It was very cool and interesting....I'm going to miss it but glad the work is over, lol. Good luck!

Thanks everyone for responding....

If the smell bothers you, buy a small ointment can of Vicks Vapor Rub and rub a little under or at the entrance of your nose. It works wonders in covering horrendous odors.

thanks ladies. I appreciate all the "walkthoughs" and advice!

I just finished A&P2! :) The first night of lab in A&P1 we did a cat, which I hated! Then right up to the end of A&P2 we did cadavers. Which was weird at first but you quickly forget that it's a human. It was very cool and interesting....I'm going to miss it but glad the work is over, lol. Good luck!

What is cadavers?

What is cadavers?

Dead bodies

By the time I finished both A&P I and II, I had dissected a fetal pig, a cat, a sheep heart, brain, and eyeball, and all the internal organs of the pig and cat. Dissections really aren't as bad as people make them out to be, and they are actually really educational and, in an odd way, fun. It's really hands on, and you start to get the big picture of how everything functions together.

Well I had anatomy then physio

Anatomy lab is all getting the bone box out and identifying landmarks, articulation points, etc...

Using the semores (the human models where it has the muscles and removable organs [plastic duh])

and basically knowing the muscles.

Histology we did with slides,

you know look at a piece of tissue and know if its connective, nervous, bone, blood, muscle, etc... I really liked histology.

And know the type of epithelial and why it is the way it is

AND kitty disection

He showed us [in a jar] how one time the one of his previous classes, one of the cats had been pregnant, very sad. They opened up the uterus and took all the babies and he has them in a jar we can see them in. they are little kitty embryos. they are at the stage where they kinda stopped looking like a embryo and more like a growing fetus. Very cool, but sad....

As for physio, so far we have done neurosensory experiments; like testing for astigmatism, depth preception, webers test, conductive deafness, two point discrimination.

also did a BMR experiment with a rat and seeing how it metabolized.

A diffusion experiment and a RBC where we got to use our own blood to put in a hypertonic or hypotonic solution

That is about it so far...its only the beginning, lots more to come!