a good dissection
25th February 2005, 2:47 pm

i had a dream last night, of which i've only just remembered, that i found a recording of my mum's voice. it made me so happy listening to it, and probably explains why i woke up feeling pretty depressed.

currently battling with the depressed feeling that seems to have taken residence in my stomach. i'm fine when i'm doing things, just a little more irritable than usual, but once i stop to breathe it creeps back up on me again. i wish it'd just die. i also wish i could have a proper cry and make myself feel better, but my body's still finding that tricky.

didn't go into uni again today, as there's still a good half a foot of snow on the ground, which makes conduit mountain and co. complete bitches to get up and down. i also can't be arsed to have another day of soaking wet socks/trainers/jeans. watching the snow yesterday morning from my seat by the telly was a lot more fun.

my dissection thing went okay yesterday actually. to start with i was really scared and on edge, but we firstly just walked through the DR to the bottom where there are little work cubicles, and sat down in one of them. dr warren started talking about what we'd do, and i started to get more freaked out as i was worrying about what my body was feeling too, and worrying that i was going to faint. he told me to count to ten, which i did, and then we went into the DR, and did some work with the bottom half of a skull and a skeleton. that went okay, and i started to feel a little better.

we then moved on to the muscles of the head and neck, using one of the posters on the wall, and that was fine. after that we looked at some of the skeleton specimens in the cupboards against the wall, as well as some real pro-sections that had been injected with plastic to make them like models. some made me feel a little anxious again, like the saggital slices through the head (straight down the nose), but once i got used to them they went fine. finally we examined a real human brain, and ran through the main features of it, and by the end i was feeling almost normal again.

we didn't do real sections of the head and neck, because dr warren said he didn't want to undo all the good work we'd done in the past hour. we're going to try that next week; i asked to do it because that'll be the ultimate test. the thing with dissection is, since counselling i'm over-associating with the specimens we deal with. i mean there were tiny foetal skeltons in the cupboard, and before i'd have seen them as fascinating, but now this train of thought runs through my head: "foetal skeletons, that means a baby had to die for them to get this skeleton, and then they'd have had to remove it from the baby, and god imagine how the family felt to have the baby die" and i consequently feel both anxious and upset. once i brak this thought cycle i should be fine though, and i always started to manage it yesterday, so fingers crossed.

walking home i felt great, but that qwuickly turned into depression for no good reason. i think it must be something about the journey home - em said that it always makes her feel shit too.

oh well, time to soldier on. it's also michelle's 20th today, so happy birthday michelle!

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