On Friday, April 12th, Ms. Trujillo and Ms. Hubbard’s anatomy classes took a trip to Grand Canyon University in Phoenix to get a tour of the school and to get an inside look – literally – at the human body.  Students got to see the inside of a corpse as well as random boy parts that had already been removed. The experience was fun and GCU has a fantastic medical and forensic program.

Approximately 40 students piled in to a chartered bus at  7:30 AM,   arriving at the university at about 9:30. The first part of the trip was a tour of the campus, which was nice but also very big. The dorms were unique from other dorms, you get your own bathroom instead of sharing a communal bathroom.

After we got a tour of the campus, we went to the cadaver lab. We were not allowed to take pictures of the body or the organs to respect the deceased. When I first walked into the lab, the smell was very unpleasant,  like heavy chemicals. If you have ever smelled rotten meat, that is pretty much what the room smelled like. The first table had an actual human body

but had the face and the private area covered. This is where it got really interesting. They opened him up showing his kidneys, liver, lungs, and the heart. His heart was small due to him having a heart attack by taking too many Tylenol. The man overdosed on Tylenol because he had dementia(memory loss) and probably forgot he took those pills.

The next table was a brain, a heart, lungs, kidney, and the pancreas. The pancreas had cancer and so did the lungs. The class got to see what a smoker’s lungs looked like. The lungs were pitch black. The pancreas looked all bumpy and normally the pancreas is smooth.  It took me a little to process that there was an actual dead body right in front of me. All the skin was gone and there was just muscle. You could see all the muscles and glands that are inside our body.

In all, the trip was eye-opening, educational, and definitely cool to see what an actual deceased person looks like and what we will look like when we pass away. After the university is done studying the body, they cremate the body and send the remains back to the family. If you are interested in the medical field, I would highly recommend taking any opportunity to explore the different types of careers available.