Today was our class fieldtrip to SuDan farms. SuDan farms (the owners are Susie and Dan...cute) is a small farm in Canby that sells lamb, fibre, turkey, chicken, and duck eggs. Our field trip there was intended to serve several purposes. The first was to give us a better sense of what a real working farm looks like, and to see some animals (the avian variety) that PCC doesn't keep on campus. The second (and the far more entertaining, in my opinion) was to give us an anatomy lesson, courtesy of a freshly slaughtered lamb.
We were spared the actual killing, but Dan had saved the butchering portion for us, which was fascinating. Up til this point we'd been working with well-preserved rats, and it's really hard to get a sense of how the organs really look and feel when they've been reduced to uni-colour rubberized blobs. These organs were about as fresh as they come and we were allowed to touch them, ask questions and poke around.
This is Dr. Henson showing off the greater omentum, which is a little like the police-force of the gut. This is the membrane that, should one of us careless, lazy techs miscount sponges during surgery, will form a pocket around the offending object and keep it in isolation. We got to open up the rumen (man, that smelled interesting...), the reticulum and the omasum. The inside of the rumen feels a little like shag carpeting, and the reticulum really does look like a honeycomb! The gall bladder is a fantastic green colour, the lungs are amazingly light, and the heart looks like a smiley face from the top.
Our lamb had some encysted fluke worms in its liver (very common in the pacific NW) as well as some minor lung scarring from pneumonia (also a NW specialty - sheep aren't wet weather animals) and those were both very cool to see.
All in all, a fantastic lab today. I only wish we could have had it before our A&P practical. Maybe then I would have figured out what the funny little flattened sac next to the stomach was.
(I think I did well on my A&P midterms...I just don't want to talk about it too much til I get my marks back and know for sure!)
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