At the weekend I announced to my husband that we are taking a trip down to London to see his brother in March.

Then after listing all the logistics behind the trip that we needed to sort (kids/ dog/ transport/ work/ hotel/ parking/ etc) I then confessed that he would be the one spending time with his brother. I am, in fact, off to geek out for the day on a Cadaver Workshop.

This will be my third time attending the labs and I am possibly even more excited this time round than the previous two. My first time was in 2017. I was so in awe of being able to witness the human body in it’s purest form that the only thing I really remember is seeing the body as a ‘whole’.  Everything was connected with layers upon layers of muscle, nerves, fascia.  And from then on I questioned everything about anatomy that I had learned in my career. A real body is NOTHING like the textbooks. Then in October 2019 I attended another Cadaver Lab, this time in Keele. And this time I was able to see the body not only as a whole, but as the separate parts. I remember being amazed at the sciatic nerve, the size of the which was the same as my finger and which separated in completely different ways than it did in the textbooks that I had studied. I remember seeing how a degenerative knee looked in relation to a ‘normal’ knee with all the ridges on the back of the patella and how it fitted with the ridges on the epicondyles. I remember seeing the thickness of the psoas muscle in the pelvic specimen and how the viscera sat on top, making me question everything I had learned about palpating and massaging this muscle. I remember holding a pelvis with the pelvic floor muscles and thinking how much it looked like a birds nest or a deep woven basket. I remember how the meniscus within the knee looked like a rugby player’s mouth-guard and how rubbery it felt in my hands. I remember observing a specimen that had had a hip replacement, with the psoas muscle being thinner on the side with the replacement and the spine showing evidence of scoliosis.  I remember talking to the lab technicians about the possible tumours on a glute max, how the bicipital ridge was deeper than I thought, how the nerve roots do not always correlate with the books and how not everyone had a palmaris longus. I never thought I could appreciate anatomy any more than I already did, but seeing exactly what lies beneath the surface made me realise just how freakin’ amazing the human body is. So if you ever get a chance to attend a Cadaver Lab…go for it. You will never look at the human body in the same way again. It’s not only a fascinating experience but a humbling one too.