Antimatter...exists without mattering?

This was the first truly hard day I've had since coming here to LLU. I suppose that in three years I'll look back and laugh because it wasn't that bad at all--but it is now, and let's be honest, that's all anybody usually cares about.

It was the first day for my group to dissect in anatomy lab. The different stations switch every week, and today I was the primary dissector. And I thought I was going to waltz in there with all of my dead person experience and do the whole shock and awe thing. They weren't going to know what had hit them. I knew all of the muscles already, the innervations, the works--I'd been up at half past five to study them. I was going to clean up those muscles and present a bright and shining example of quality cadaver to the next group. Basically, I knew what I was doing and I was going to be awesome.

Somewhere, someone is laughing.

I'm going to call our cadaver Jean, because that's the most interesting unisex name I could find in 15 seconds of googling. I'm not allowed to tell you anything about it but I can tell you that Jean had had too many Twinkies prior to expiration. YOU try getting down to deep muscles in a neck that has a triple roll of fat on it! I couldn't find anything! There weren't even decent fascial planes! I tried blunt dissection, I tried sharper blades, but the muscle was sticking together, and so the others start poking around, and you can't poke a cadaver; they turn into ground beef. Which is what ours did. We had a 4x4 inch square to dissect, with four muscles to find and half a dozen small veins, and we got nothing. I got nothing.

There weren't enough people around to help. One of them let me stand behind her for 15 minutes and wait, only to finish with what she was doing and tell me she had a meeting to go to. Another promised to come three times, when he finished, and never showed. Finally, I literally grabbed on of the doctors by the arm and dragged him through a crowd of grasping hands. He poked around, slaughtered the one structure we had found, and said we had to start again on the other side. Because not finding the structures is not acceptable.

By this time, we've been in lab for three hours (the first hour not being dissection). My group is sick of my screwing up. Other tables have left, loudly congratulating themselves on their fine work. And I'm furious at myself, and my blood sugar is dropping (they call it hypoglycemic here!), and when I'm angry I cry, so I'm trying not to get too watery. It was a mess. I snapped at Aldo hardcore when he made fun of me. I'm really not a good person.

Long story short--tried the other side. Not much more luck, but we managed to snag the last TA before all the other doctors abandoned the lab and went home. I wonder if their consciences were at rest--that was a dirty trick. Anyway, for the next hour he worked on Jean. He did find several things (although I would describe their existance as more of a hypothetical than a literal event), and I'm very grateful he did.

Finally, as he was winding down, I stood up. I was calculating that it had been almost nine hours since I'd eaten when the room tilted right. I ended up staggering down the hall to the snack machine, and I'm absolutely sure that had I not gotten something sugary and stuffed it down at that precise moment, I wouldn't have made it back into lab. I was that close to passing out. We'd been there for four and a half hours before I gave up and left.

Basically, it was awful.

Pretty much, I screwed up.

Does it matter? In the long run, I doubt it. But it matters right now.