The blood of the lamb

You may be expecting something with faith, Christianity, what I think, feel or believe. After all, it is Advent, right?

Sorry. This is about, the blood of the lamb. It is entirely possible it was a goat, small pig or sheep, not young but adult sheep. None of those however lend themselves to the mixed title line. So, leave it at some hoofed, herbivore.

When you study anatomy, there inevitably comes a time when you will be looking at the parts of an animal usually hidden from view. Quite often you come in contact with these bit and pieces. Their condition is relative to the creature, the number of times it has been used for this reason and the quality of experience your instructor/institution wishes for you to have.

This is how I cam to be in very close proximity to the a lot of the-still-connected-to-each-other parts of the lamb. We were on the circulatory / pulmonary section. No better way to explain ‘heart stings’ than to see them it seems.

I forget the term for the insides being sold in a frozen bunch, all together, just right for study. “Crop”? Esophagus no down to the, well, down. The kidneys, liver, lungs, heart, some other bits. All nestled in the the deep fascia, all pretty and ready to be explored. Well, mostly, ready to be explored.

Seems  the lamb was still kinda frozen inside. This makes it difficult to slip your finger down the vena cava or arota and into a heart valve. It also makes another wonderful learning experience more difficult than expected. That would be the ‘inflating’ of the lungs.

To accomplish this little feat, you simply slide a straw from any fast food shop, into one of the bronchi, have someone hold the bronchi snug around the straw, place you mouth over the other end, mear inches from the lamb assembly, and blow – hard. If your experiment is thawed all the way – this is really cool to see and do.

However, if your particular lamb is still on the solid side, and you put your straw into a particularly solid bit, the lung will not inflate. Obviously the thing to do is, take a deeper breath and blow harder. A lot harder. This however will not thaw the deeper portions of frozen lung enough to inflate the lung. However, warm air being being exhaled and of course the friction caused by the speed of that air can loosen some of the frozen material. Since the air is not going to the lung as intended, it needs to go somewhere. That happens to be, back the way it came. Thankfully not in the straw which is still being fed from the mouth end.

So, all that air and a good amount of slurpy-consistency lambs blood come back up and out the bronchi, much like a cough I would imagine, follow the straw up to – the face at the other end. The only good part of this experience is the fact that the mouth is closed because of blowing into the straw. This keeps lamb slushy out of the mouth and only on the lips, checks and of course, light colored tee shirt worn to school that day.

After some more Hannibal Lecter like scalpel work the lung was in its own, and having been handled quite a bit more, much more receptive to air flow. In goes another straw, out comes the CO2 and VIOLA! (sp?)

It is an amazing thing to see a lung inflate inches from your own face. The size, the shape, the change in color, just a remarkable thing. Seeing heart strings, squeezing a bit of the last meal out of the esophagus, all of it was just gruesomely wonderful.

I could do without the blood stains on my tee shirt but hey, I think about what the lamb gave up. I’m still on the plus side.

Peace, Ant-Knee