Feb 08, 08 06:01 pm — We're winding down the first semester and our last task in lab was to remove the brain and save it for the neuro class next month. To do it, we first had to disarticulate the head. That's a fancy way of saying, "Chop it off!" Well, mostly, we left the pharyngial system in place so we could play with it.

The first step was to peel off the scalp, because the saws work better on bare bone. Peeling involved scraping the scull clean and took about half an hour. Next, we rolled the body to a prone position and performed a laminectomy. This meant taking a chisel and breaking the vertebral lamina, the bony arches that cover the spinal cord and anchor the spinous processes that you can feel running down the middle of your back. Once the spinal canal was open, we cut the spinal cord at the middle of the neck.

After flipping the body back over we were ready to open the skull using surgical mechanical saws. We cut around the middle front and sides, then down the back to the foramen magnum, the opening for the spinal cord, and we removed the top of the skull and the back of the base, the occipital bone.

Finally we were ready to begin removing the brain itself, but we held up after making a discovery: A golf ball sized tumor on the inside of the skull. We carefully snipped the dural covering of the brain, freeing it to begin lifing it out of the lower skull. The most difficult part was locating and cutting the 24 cranial nerves and cutting them while preserving them for further study. The whole process ended after about 2 hours.

Splitting the head was simply a matter of hard work, it took about 15 minutes with a surgical hacksaw.

Hope everyone is having a good year so far! :)

[journal edited by MacThulhu on 2008:02:08 18:03:49]

[journal edited by MacThulhu on 2008:02:08 18:04:19]