Anatomy Trains Dissection, Day Two

Forward Into the Past...

Today I'm thinking about the last day of my first dissection class and I was in up to my elbows and over my head. I’m lucky I didn’t sprain anything.

 

I was working on exposing and removing the upper portion of the Superficial Front Line (which runs from the rectus abdominus up the fascia along the sternum and sternalis and on up to the SCMs on both sides – do a simple standing back bend to feel this fascial line of pull ) in it’s entirety. I was carefully teasing up the sternalis muscle. It was delicate and thin, thin like carpaccio. Todd Garcia, director of the lab, came up and complimented me, telling me this was one of the best dissections of a sternalis in progress that he had seen. I felt ordained.

Tom Myers then came over, worrying at me like a fretful mother to be careful not to cut through this gossamer myofascial unit.

“Don’t worry, Tom, don’t worry,” I assured and shooed him away, hadn’t I just been ordained?  – but he was still worried, as I would have been if these were my theories.

In dissection you often use the blunt ends of things, like medical probes or the blunt side of the scapel, to tease and gently pull the tissues away from each other. That's because the sharp side of the scapel can so easily shred what you’re going after even when you are very careful.

So I carefully returned to my task. Gently hold the tissue up with foreceps, delicately tease away a little more. Hold the tissue up, tease away a little more. It gets quite hypnotic: hold tissue up, tease away more; hold up, tease away, hold, tease, hold, tease, hold, sh**...

There was no rewind, no undo – I had shredded right through the sternalis. I called Tom to my table, may as well face the music as fast as possible.

His green/blue eyes gazed at me from above his surgical mask. My mouth opened and words came out, but not any that formed a coherent sentence. My hands and arms recreated the scene of the accident for him.

Without missing a beat he asked me: “ So, what did you learn from this?”

“Um,” I stammered, “ That the strenalis is way to flimsy to do what we think it does in the Superficial Front Line?"

His gazed softened in its intensity and shifted to a look I can only describe as crestfallen: his beautiful theory had been shredded by an ugly fact.

Flash-forward 6 years later and KMI graduate Jeff Mahadeen does what I and others since have tried but not managed, he excised the upper SFL intact!

While the current wisdom is that most people don’t have a sternalis, and while Richard (remember, we name our bodies) had a very well-developed one, Todd believes that the sternalis has a tendency to be not only underdeveloped but that very few people have the ability to excise it properly.

I would tend to agree.

Great work Jeff !