Weird story here. This semester I'm a TA for BME 348: Systems Analysis in BME. It primarily has to do with control systems, which I had two semesters of in undergrad. The professor told me on Thursday that there was a lab portion that had to do with computer modeling in Matlab. That was fine by me, as I was somewhat familiar with all of that.

There's also a graduate version of this class in BME, taught by the same professor. I think there aren't enough TA's for that class so the professor asked us TA's to help out with the labs for that class too. That's fine, I said. So he asked us to show up at his office Friday morning for some training related to the labs.

Again, I thought that this was the computer modeling labs that he had previously referred to. But I was in for a surprise...

I show up at 9:45am on Friday morning. After going over a few scheduling logistics, we head over to the Experimental Science Building. Already I'm perplexed because that's where the Biology labs are held.

We walk in and meet Dr. Dee Silverthorn. She heads up one of the biology labs in ESB. She tells us to grab a seat at one of the lab stations, and hands us some lab packets saying, "these are the instruction manuals for the lab that your class will be going through". I find it weird that there are no computers anywhere in the room, and yet we're supposed to be doing a Matlab exercise. I read the top of the lab packet: "Cardiovascular Anatomy". I become even more perplexed.

She then passes out vacuum sealed bags filled with a sheep heart and lungs. (WHAT?!) I quickly peruse the lab packet some more. We're supposed to identify all the arteries and veins coming to and from the heart and then dissect the heart away from the lungs. Now, I have no problem dissecting stuff. I've dissected a cow heart at least twice now. At Hopkins we also dissected frogs which we had to kill ourselves beforehand... but that's a story for another time. After a brief moment of standing there looking confused, I just decide to shrug it off and start the lab. I got into it really fast, cutting stuff up and trying to get through the lab. Our specimen had a lot of fat on its heart (not the healthiest of lambs) so we had to spend some time removing the fat so that we could get at the actual heart. While I had forgotten a lot about cardiovascular anatomy, I was surprised at how much I actually remembered from my undergrad class. Thanks Dr. Shoukas.

When we finally succeeded in removing the heart from the lungs cleanly, we got ready to cut into the heart itself to examine the chambers. But Dr. Silverthorn said that we could first examine the flow of blood through the heart firsthand... by RUNNING WATER THROUGH IT AND SQUEEZING THE HEART WITH OUR HANDS to simulate the pumping action of the heart. Okay, I thought, probably not the grossest thing I've done at this point, so sure. Lo and behold, you could run water through the vena cava into the right atrium, squeeze, and water would come out through the pulmonary artery. Cool. I felt like the guy from "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom".

The whole time, the other three TA's didn't ask why we were doing this. I figured they knew what was going on, and decided that I didn't want to ask a stupid question about how dissecting sheep related to control systems and systems analysis.

Oh well. It was fun and interesting anyways.