Formaldehyde Fridays

I have been up since 7 am yesterday, with a 2 hour nap serving as a break.  I've been studying for a lab practical I have in about an hour.  What's more appropriate at this point than to write a blog?

So this lab is for ZOO 172, Human Anatomy & Physiology.  It's basically just memorize all the things.  This class is the second half of a sequence, the first being ZOO 171.  ZOO 171 lab wasn't as difficult as this is.  171 was considered a "Miami Plan" course, or the equivalent to a gen. ed.  Because of this, we had to do a "discussion group" project... which was just standing up in front of the class and talking about some kind of deadly infection of your choosing.  We did MRSA.
So that was an easy 20 points.
In 172, we don't have those groups.  We have quizzes.  And actual practicals.  Exams in 171 were like this:
The prof would come in, tell us to get out a blank sheet of paper, and fire up old projector.  Then he'd show us slides of different tissue types, or different phases of mitosis.  Easy enough.
In 172, which is now strictly nursing student, we have real practicals.  In a microbiology class I took last year, we had "real" practicals.  In a practical, there are stations set up around the lab, and you get about a minute and a half to answer 2 questions at the station, then you move to the next.
Our practical today is 40 questions, 2 questions per station.
The subject matter?
EVERY SINGLE MUSCLE, EVERY SINGLE BONE, MUSCLE ORIGINS, MUSCLE INSERTIONS, CAT DISSECTIONS, AND THE RESPIRATORY SYSTEM.
Seriously?

I think what I'm looking forward to the most is panicking over the cats we've been dissecting.  The prof will put pins in different muscles, and we have to name the muscle, origin, and insertion.
This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have such an XTREME reaction to formaldehyde.

The first day we started cat dissections, the prof exclaimed,"FIND A LAB PARTNER!"  I had picked out mine, but she wasn't aware that I chose her.  I looked to her to see if she'd like to pair up, but some other hoe already got to her.  So I look around the room, and by God, everyone had already gotten a partner.
I was the only person without a partner.
I asked the girl who I WANTED to be partners with if I could be in her group.  She said sure.
Super duper.
The first two weeks of dissections were supposed to strictly muscles.  Strictly muscles, as in, do no cut the cat open.
The first thing the girls in my group did was split it down the middle, and then all of the cat's guts flopped out.
Great.
So I grab a scapula and try to inch my way towards the cat.  All of a sudden, it's like someone has dumped an entire bottle of Frank's chili sauce directly onto my eyeballs.  If you didn't know any better, you'd think that my entire family had been blown up and eaten by grizzly bears and I was just finding out.
I asked the other girls in my group, "Does this stuff bother your eyes really bad?  Mine are kind of... on fire."
They both just shrug and say,"No... just makes my nose run a little."

So I'm really excited to take this practical.