Adding Cadaver Days to My Calendar: Day 4

It was recently brought to my attention that we would only be spending two semesters with the cadavers. TWO!!!  You would think I would have found this out ahead of time, right?  Well, I didn’t want to get ahead of myself only to find out that It would be cadavers all year long! Instead, I tried to just see the light at the end of this semester long tunnel and worry about what comes later, well, later!  Want to know something even more exciting?  After this semester is over, I won’t have to see the cadavers again until my 6th semester!!!  The light at the end of the tunnel is getting a whooole lot brighter now, isn’t it?

Now I must say, on a side note, that I’m very lucky to have had to deal with the cadavers from the very beginning.  If I hadn’t faced them then, I’m sure I’d still be classifying myself as someone with a panic disorder.  I’d probably be struggling with my tests.  And you better believe I would not have walked my booty down the hall to go stand outside the anatomy lab and freak out until I got somewhat desensitized to just being NEAR the bodies.  No, I wouldn’t even be close to where I am now.  So, knowing what I know now, I’m so thankful to have tackled this monster from the get-go.

Back to my point…In my excitement of finding out that are only two semesters of cadaver lab, I quickly flipped through my syllabus and started checking off the days I’ve already gotten through and counting the days left to go.  Phew! Not too many…it’s doable!  Then again, we have a lab quiz on Friday….and I’ll probably need to go in and at least look at the cadavers one more time for review.  Oh, annnd we have a practice lab quiz this week that involves going into the cadaver lab…okay.  So 2 more days of cadaver lab added on to my schedule.  Great…

Here’s the thing though…NOBODY is making me go in on those days.  The practice quiz is optional and the review day is something I came up with on my own.  If you had read my posts that were written prior to my first cadaver lab experience, you probably wouldn’t have ever guessed I’d be doing EXTRA cadaver labs by my own free will.  Yea, I wouldn’t have guessed it either.  

If that isn’t impressing you enough, which, I mean, a.) you either don’t have any major phobias or b.) you clearly haven’t read my posts, then at least let me attempt to impress you with this…I went into cadaver lab today for my practice quiz and I DID NOT take my xanax.  Nope! None of it!  My sympathetic nervous system was as free as bird to produce whatever horrific panic attack inducing sensations it wanted to…ain’t nobody shutting it down today! 

The lab was set up exactly how it would be for a lab quiz.  Everybody was instructed to keep quiet and to rotate every 2 minutes to the next station.  There was a wet lab group and a dry lab group.  I was in the wet lab group, which was nice because that meant that I’d get the cadavers over with first.  Since we had our whole class in the room today, multiple people were at each station, as opposed to a real quiz or exam where only one person will stand at each station.  That pretty much means that I’ll be standing at a body all by myself for the most part.

I started out okay.  I quickly found the ID tags and looked no further than I had to to identify the tagged structures.  I was quick to name things and so I spent most of my two minutes staring at the ceiling, trying to pick something, maybe one of those fire sprinkler things, to look at to keep my mind from fully recognizing what was going on.  I was happy to move once our two minutes were up.  I found that my worst panic attack experiences came in undergrad when I felt that I couldn’t get up and move/leave during a quiz or test.  At least for this quiz we’d be moving from station to station, burning off some of the jitters.  I didn’t feel quite so trapped. 

About halfway through the quiz my mind started to get what was going on.  Maybe it was the foot I had seen…or the hand…or maybe I had lost focus with the ceiling and suddenly realized where I was at.  I’d find a muscle…”Okay,  sartorius….originates from….PERSON!….no, no….ASIS…..PERSON! DEAD PERSON!…shut up….inserts on the superior medial condyle of the….did I just see a hand? Yes that’s a hand….okay….tibia…..find the ceiling, look at the ceiling….don’t think about dead people! Shoot, now I’m thinking about dead people…okay, ceiling…”  Well now my breathing was starting to suck….and you know what comes with bad breathing?  Dizziness, tingliness in my face and hands…evil stuff that is pretty much a way for my panic attacks to announce their arrival.  So I started to fight back for my breathing.  I regained it, some, but was starting to feel light headed.  I got through the rest of the lab and stood to the side while others took the 5 extra minutes to go back over anything.  One of my friends asked how I was doing.  I told him I was feeling dizzy so he told me to go back to the other side of the curtain just to take a break from the area.  At that point we were waiting to go into the dry lab, so it wasn’t like I was running away from the situation.  I bounced back just fine for dry lab and ended the practice quiz on a good note.

Now I did not have a panic attack in lab today.  I felt what probably anybody would feel if they started to think about what was really going on in front of them.  The best thing about today was that, although I did start to feel a bit light headed and my breathing wasn’t the best, I managed to stay strong and fight the panic attack back.  I know the little game panic attacks play, and I’m getting pretty good at cutting them off before they can get the best of me.  If I can stop a panic attack during cadaver lab, I can stop a panic attack anytime! 

So today was a great day!  Went into an extra day of lab and did it without xanax.  And although I got anxious, I didn’t panic.  I plan to take xanax for any required lab days/lab quizzes and tests.  I don’t want my learning/grade to be affected by me being distracted with whether or not I’m going to panic.  That being said, for the days that I choose to go into lab for review or for practice quizzes, I plan to skip the xanax.  If I did panic, I at least know that I can leave those situations without paying the price for it later.

So here is to another successful cadaver lab experience…and yet another BIG step in facing my fears! 🙂

 

 

Cadaver lab recap:

Prelab Day 1: Walked down the hall and stood outside of the lab with the door opened…could only see the curtain and maybe a body bag through the slit.  Couldn’t even watch my friends go in

Prelab Day 2: Walked down the hall without any problems, quickly made it through the door and into the dry lab.  Peered out from the dry lab around the corner into the wet lab, past the curtain and saw a few body bags.

Lab Day 1: Cried and took a while to get beyond the curtain, but eventually got into the lab and slowly, and I mean SLOWLY, managed to look at the cadavers

Lab Day 2: One of the first people in the lab! And I jumped right into identifying things!

Lab Day 3: TOUCHED a body!!! Specifically the superficial fibular nerve!

Lab Day 4:  Spent 30 minutes in lab WITHOUT xanax!!!!

 

*** I’d just like to add that if at anytime you, whoever you may be, happen to stumble across this site and find that you have questions about anything regarding panic attacks/panic disorder/cadavers/phobias/PT school, don’t be afraid to comment/message me or whatever it is you can do on here! When I was struggling with all of this I wanted nothing more than to find somebody who had been absolutely terrified, like myself, and managed to pull through. I never found that person, but it’s my hope that I can be that person for someone else one day!

The Cadaver and the Painted Nails

Before school started I went out and bought a couple different nail polishes.  I don’t normally wear nail polish, but I felt that if I picked bright happy colors that maybe it would help keep me in a good mood.  I also thought that it would help me in cadaver lab to see my bright nails, although they are hard to really see through my gloves! 

I had just talked to my professor last lab about how some cadavers have their nails painted.  I hadn’t seen any of those cadavers, and I thought it was pretty strange that nobody removed the nail polish prior to sending the cadavers to the PT department.  Seems like the painted nails make the cadaver more of a person than a body.  I was REALLY hoping to avoid the painted nails for fear that I’d instantly get thrown back into the “That’s a person….they had a life…a family…” kind of thinking.  Fortunately, my professor had gone around the room covering most of the hands up. 

A classmate of mine was walking by my seat during one of our breaks today.  As she was coming down the stairs she noticed my bright pink nails and started to say, “Oh, you know what your nails remind me of?”.  I froze.  I knew exactly what was coming next.  Dear God girl don’t say it! “They remind me of the nail polish color one of the cadavers has”. Now why anyone would say that to a girl who has very obvious issues with the cadavers is beyond me.  “Yea, I’m probably one of the last people you should be telling that to,” I replied, trying to be nice yet trying to also make it clear that I was hoping to end the conversation about my cadaver like nails.  “Oh, I’m sorry!  It’s a really pretty color.  It just reminded me of the cadavers, that’s all!” she responded.  “That’s okay, I’ll just take it off when I get home…I’m not really comfortable knowing a cadaver has the same nail polish” I said back.  She tried to tell me again how she liked the color and that the painted nails weren’t very obvious in lab, to which another girl piped in about how the painted nails are actually pretty noticeable.  Great!

So I sat there for a few minutes feeling really uncomfortable about my stupid nails.  They were supposed to be a distraction, not the actual cause of my anxiety!  All I could think about was how some woman painted her nails or got them done or whatever, and then……died.  She was living her life with her painted nails and then died.  Just died.  Died. I swear, sometimes I think I’m the only person that thinks this much about these things!  Too emotional…

Anyways, I got back to my apartment today and considered taking the polish off.  It was an odd reminder of how one minute you’re living your life and the next you’re not.  Then I thought about it some more and decided to keep the nail polish on as a reminder that life is short…but you paint your damn nails pink and you keep on living your life until one day you just don’t!  And you can’t worry about that day because it’s just not in your control.  So, for now, my nails are staying pink!  Who knew that a cadaver I didn’t even see could teach me so much!  🙂

Cadaver Lab: Day 3 “If I had the nerve…”

So I got better sleep the night before this cadaver lab….well, aside from being up until 2 in the morning battling a massive cockroach in my bedroom (I won, btw!). By better I mean I didn’t dream about being in lab and having to choose which dead body I was going to cut up….or…even worse, wake up thinking I saw a cut up hand on my bed.  Yes, I had both situations happen to me before my other labs…and yes I really did wake up seeing a cut up hand on my bed that wasn’t actually there (It’s called hypnopompic hallucinations…more on that later).

I went to talk to my counselor at 11 and was back to the PT building by 12:15.  I tried to kill my time til lab by studying but soon found myself talking to my friends about how we are all studying for our classes.  I don’t think we’ve quite figured it out yet but I feel like I’m starting to catch my stride a bit. 

Lab went well…popped my xanax as I was walking into class, had fun in dry lab, and dealt with the cadavers.  I try to have tunnel vision in the wet lab by only focusing on the things we need to identify, but every now and then I’d catch a hand, a foot, or something gross, out of the corner of my eye.  Whenever I did see something that made the pile of muscles, bones, ligaments, nerves, vessels more of a person than a cadaver, I’d have to take a step back and try to let the thought go.  I felt on the verge of panic at one point.  Again, I backed off and tried to calm myself down.  I don’t know if it was the xanax or the fact that I’ve been through enough panic attacks to know how to deal with them, but I was able to calmed down.

I was talking to my friend towards the end of the lab.  We had just identified everything on a body, mainly nerves, and were talking about other things.  We started talking about how we should come in and study on our own sometime.  Then she said, “If I had the nerve, I’d come in here this weekend.”  I started laughing, then placed my finger an inch away from the cadaver’s common fibular nerve and said, “maybe you should borrow his!!!” then proceeded to crack up even more.  It was the first time I’ve caught myself laughing in the cadaver lab.  My friend just shook her head.  Thinking she didn’t get it, I said, “get it?! If you had the nerve…like you don’t have the nerve….so you should borrow this one…so then, you know, you’d have the nerve! Do you get it?!?!” Again, she just stood there shaking her head and eyeballing my pointed finger that was just the slightest bit away from the cadaver’s nerve.  “Touch it,” she said.  “Oh my gosh, you still don’t get my joke?!” I replied. “No, I get it” she responded, “I just want you to touch the nerve.”  Now I hadn’t touched a body in my previous two labs.  This lab I found myself in awe as I watched some of my classmates go digging through the cadavers trying to ID things.  I had absolutely no intention on touching one….no thank you.  But for some reason, maybe it was the good mood that my lame little joke put me in, I felt that I could maybe, just maybe touch the nerve.  And so, my friends, in cadaver lab #3….I TOUCHED a cadaver.  I was so excited I shouted across the lab to my other friends that I had touched a cadaver.  My teacher, who knows about my anxiety issues with cadavers, yelled back, “Yea! Let’s all go out and get drinks!” It was silly, and fun…and everything you wouldn’t ever expect to find in a cadaver lab. 

I had heard of people making light of things in cadaver lab. I never really understood how that was okay until this past Friday.  Before I thought that that would be offensive and mean.  And while I’d never make fun of the person, I find comfort in making fun of the situation.  If I donated my body to science, I wouldn’t want some poor girl crying in the corner, terrified out of her mind.  I’d want it to be happy and positive.

At the end of each lab I like to look back on my first lab experience just to remind myself of how far I’ve come.  Just two weeks ago I couldn’t even walk into the lab.  Last week I got up the nerve (haha! Okay, I’ll stop!) to walk straight into the lab and jump right in.  This week, I touched a cadaver.  Quite the turn around for someone who was just weeks ago crying and telling the TA how they couldn’t do it.  I’m very happy with the person I’m starting to become 🙂

Cadaver Lab: Day 2

Last week I faced my biggest fear; a fear so big that I spent most of this last year struggling with a panic disorder.  Despite the rocky start to last Friday, I eventually made it into the cadaver lab and was able to participate with the rest of the students.  And I’ve never felt more accomplished than how I felt  that day.  Sounds silly, but a panic disorder has the ability to knock you back down every time you try to get up.  After a while, you start to doubt whether or not it’s even possible to ever get back up again.  Fortunately, I kept on fighting and my efforts are now paying off.

Today I walked into the anatomy lab to face my big fear for the second time.  I knew the fear wasn’t 100% gone, but could tell it had faded significantly.  I decided to only stick to a half a pill of xanax right before class started but opted to skip the second half of the pill after the one hour lecture of histology.  I had taken the second half last week just to ensure the first half hadn’t worn off when I needed it most.  Feeling much braver than last week, I made up my mind to take my chances with just the one.

I got through the first two hours of class just fine.  Then came the lab.  Yes, I knew what to expect this time.  I couldn’t get the images from last week out of my mind if I tried.  But I still wasn’t quite sure how I would react.  I cried last week then had to slowly, and I mean SLOWLY, ease my way up to the bodies.  In undergrad, I struggled with the first day of cat dissection, found out it wasn’t as bad as I thought, got a little overconfident, and then had a harder time the 2nd time in lab.  So today I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t jump in too fast.

I got into the wet lab before most of the other students.  Compare that to last week when everybody else was in the wet lab while I was standing on the other side of the curtain crying and telling the TA how I just didn’t think I could go in.  I kept my distance initially but realized I could only do that for so long…the TA was showing my group the nerves of the lumbar plexus and I was SO excited to see them! As she started asking my group questions I began settling in.  The more questions I answered and the more questions I asked the less I had a chance to think about where I was and what I was doing.  Every now and then I’d get weirded out and have to take a step back and gather myself, but for the most part I did just fine! 

I’m still not comfortable with cadaver lab.  I’d rather avoid it, but I can see how important it is for not only learning anatomy but for continuing this positive progression toward conquering my phobia and panic disorder.  I see how important cadaver lab is.  You just get a way better understanding of the human body when you can see inside of it as opposed to looking at it in a book. I am absolutely blown away by how far I have come in a WEEK!!! It is incredible how much one day, shoot, one hour, can influence a very big part of your life.  We will see where the cadaver lab takes me, but, in the meantime, I can happily say I have had two very successful Fridays! 🙂

 

 

Week 3 of PT School:

This weekend I’ll be studying my booty off for my first anatomy quiz.  I usually don’t think much of quizzes but I heard this is a beast of a quiz.  I’m hoping that by the end of the weekend I’ll have all my lecture notes memorized, especially my notes on all the nerves, their roots, innervations and deficits (which is quite the task!) .  I have a physiology quiz and an anatomy quiz on Wednesday! Woo! 🙂

Today I Faced My Biggest Fear: Cadaver Lab

As I mentioned in my previous post, this past week has been insane.  Monday I told myself I was going to drop out of the program after a week.  Tuesday I was back to loving PT school.  Wednesday I had managed to overcome my fear of cadaver lab enough to finally walk down the hall and stare at the open door…but that was it.  Thursday I went into the wet lab to get to the dry lab and had seen a few body bags.  Then came today….

For the last year I’ve struggled with a panic disorder and a huge, and I mean HUGE, phobia of cadavers.  I fell helplessly into the downward spiral of anxiety and had many times reached the point where I felt like I was never going to get out.  It seemed like any time I tried to fight, I just kept getting knocked back down again.  How was I supposed to beat something that was in my own mind?  And what was worse was that I was starting to begin to see it as something that was part of who I was, which made it even harder to break from. 

The fuel that kept my anxiety fire burning was my deep fear of having to face a dead body.  A cut up dead body.  A body that at one point had a life.  I didn’t know what I was going to see, how I was going to react, and how those around me were going to react.  I had, of course, seen pictures in anatomy books before, but I knew that it would be a way different feeling to actually see the body in person than in a book.

So I applied to PT schools, got accepted into the one I wanted most, and then started there this week.  And I found out on Wednesday that I’d be seeing an already dissected cadaver on Friday.  How in the world was I going to do that?! Thankfully, I found the courage inside of me to take those very big steps of just walking to the classroom on Wednesday and Thursday.  And although it doesn’t seem like much, those steps were a crucial part of overcoming my biggest obstacle.  How could I expect myself to go INTO the lab if I couldn’t even get to the door?!  So I did what I could in the two days leading up to today.  I just had to find a way to turn my baby steps into great big giant steps today.  And this is how my day went…

Woke up an hour earlier than I wanted to this morning.  Since I started to feel the nerves kicking in, I decided to use my extra hour to go ride the spin bike at my apartment complex. I pushed myself as hard as I could for 20 minutes on the bike until my nerves settled.  Usually it takes me about 15 minutes of exercise to really calm my nerves, but I pushed it an extra 5 just to be safe.

Took a shower.  Went to the store and bought face masks, gloves, and vick’s vapor rub.  Went straight to school, parked and headed over to the counseling center.  Had my first appointment with my new therapist, which went well, and then headed back to my car.  I had about an hour and a half to kill before class.  I considered sitting in the building and catching up on my anatomy prior to class starting, but decided that that would probably get me too hyped up.  Instead, I sat in the car and listened to music. 

Fifteen minutes prior to class starting I took a half a pill of xanax.  Walked with my friend to dry lab, and got ready for our 1 hour lecture on histology.  Luckily, the xanax kicked in so I was able to pay attention fairly well during the lecture.  Had I not taken anything, I probably would have run out of the building! After lecture we split into two groups.  The group I was in stayed in the dry lab to identify bones, slides, and x-ray films.  The other group went into the cadaver lab.  I took another half a pill of my xanax at the start of the dry lab just to ensure the first one wouldn’t wear off when I needed it the most.  I did well in the dry lab and managed to stay pretty focused on the task at hand.  It was when we were getting ready to switch that I could feel the nerves come back.

I got into the little area on the safe side of the curtain and put on a lab coat, my gloves, and a whole lot of Vick’s vapor rub for my nose.  At this point, most everybody knew I was scared out of my mind.  A couple people gave me words of encouragement.  One girl patted my arm and told me it was going to be okay.  My professor had told me that I could wait in that little waiting area even after the other students went into the lab just so that I could have a few minutes to gather myself alone.  At this time, I began to panic. There was NO WAY I was going to be able to do this.  Not a chance.  As I paced around the little area like a caged tiger in the zoo, I caught a glimpse of a cadaver out of my eye.  Everyone told me I’d only be able to see the hip….so why did I just think I saw almost a whole body?  Now I definitely couldn’t do it.  It was at this moment that the TA came into the little area to ask how I was doing.  That’s when I started crying.  I felt like an idiot, but when you’re that scared, you can’t really control yourself.  I quickly gathered myself and apologized.  She was very sympathetic and told me to take my time. I glanced into the room and saw a body, then quickly looked back at the TA.  FEAR….FEAR…FEAR…then a bit of relief.  I had JUST seen my first cadaver…some of the pressure was coming off. I told my TA I was doing the best that I could, that I wouldn’t let myself fall behind, and that  it was my goal to complete at least ONE of the 6 sections of our little packet which amounted to identifying 5-7 things in one of the bodies (it was hardly anything but I needed an attainable goal).  After another minute or two of pacing I finally decided that I could move along the wall into the room and stand behind my group of friends who were looking at a cadaver.  I wouldn’t be able to see anything if I stayed by the wall.

Into the room I went.  FEAR…FEAR…FEAR…and then a little relief.  Wow, I just entered the room that had scared me so much these past two days.  Progress!  I stayed by the wall a little while and caught little glimpses of the body my friends were looking at.  At one point the TA came over and asked them a question about what the hole in the pelvic bone was.  Silence.  So from my place along the wall I piped in with, “obturator foramen”.  Everyone turned around and looked at me. “I can still participate from here!” I laughed.  The TA smiled and told me good job.  My friends moved to the next body and I followed them….shoot….I hadn’t done any of the labels for the first body!

At the second body I started forcing myself to look a little more….from a comfortable distance.  I made it my goal to try to identify at least one of the labels.  So without doing too much scanning of the body I quickly found label F.  “Is F the rectus abdominis??” Everybody turned around and looked at me again, smiling….not only had I finally looked, but I had actually looked close enough to identify the muscle…correctly! Now I was on a roll. And after a few minutes, I had everything labeled for that station….I had reached my goal! 

And you know what?  By the end of that lab…I had gone through and labeled everything…even the first body I had missed.  Everyone was proud of me…especially myself.

If you ever take psychology, you learn about how if somebody is afraid of spiders, you have to slowly introduce them to spiders.  Maybe you spend time talking about spiders, then after a few sessions of that you get them to look at a picture of a spider.  Then after a while you get them to look at a real spider.  And eventually they end up being able to hold a spider.  That kind of stuff isn’t done in a day or a week and probably not even in a month.  But in 3 days I trained myself!  I got to the door, got inside the door, got to the curtain, got inside the curtain, got behind my group, got a little closer and then finally faced what I have been dreading most.  And it is the most wonderful feeling when you do finally face your fears.  

I still have a ways to go.  The cadaver lab still makes me uncomfortable.  But I have significantly reduced my anxiety in a way I didn’t think was possible.  And with that said, if I can overcome this, I most certainly believe that anyone struggling with anxiety or a phobia can one day overcome the thing they fear the most.  Push yourself a little step further every now and then, but always know that you’re in control.  You choose when you want to try, but don’t fault yourself if you can’t.  Celebrate the baby steps, or even just the fact that you THOUGHT about taking baby steps.  And don’t worry about what other people will think.  I stood there today crying in a doctorate level lab with grown adults and everybody supported me.  And one last thing…I have felt that the more open I have been about my anxiety and cadaver phobia, the more encouragement and support I have found.  It is so much better to go into a situation and know that people understand and are there for you than to go into a situation wondering what everyone will think if you panic.  

As horrible of a year as this has been for myself, I hope that this whole experience will allow me to help somebody going through something similar one day.  It may seem like all hope is lost, trust me, I’ve been there, but you WILL get through!