Kathleen

The alien he/she pig

So today in my anatomy and physiology lab we had to dissect fetal pigs. I usually don’t mind dissecting stuff but this thing was just CREEPY looking. It was slimy, hairless, and kind of small, and it reminded me of some sort of alien. So from then on I referred to it as the alien pig.

Once my partner and I got over our initial hesitance to touch the alien pig, we had to tie it down and start the dissection.

So during the dissection were were supposed to identify different organs, etc., and we decided right away that our pig was a female pig.

After about 20 minutes or so we finally worked our way through various body systems and made our way to identifying parts of the reproductive system. Knowing that our pig was a female, we looked, and looked, but didn’t find anything. I found this fat-like thing which I kept poking with various utensils, unsure if it was what we were looking for. “I think this is something…” I said, but my partner said it was probably just muscle. I had my doubts so I kept poking at it with the probes until our professor was free to help us.

After a while we called over our professor and asked “Dr. Meer, are these the ovaries?”

He paused for a second, looking at us, and said “This is a male pig, and this is part of the male reproductive system…”

We both just stood there, somewhat humiliated that we couldn’t tell that our she-alien-pig was actually a he-alien-pig.

Our professor just kind of gave us a mocking smile, as we started laughing hysterically at ourselves, and finally he went back around to helping other students.

Shortly after we got over laughing at ourselves, my partner said, “Haha I can’t believe you’ve been playing with pig balls for the last 10 minutes!”

A few people glanced over at our table as she said this, probably thinking that I’m some weird perv, and yet again my partner and I went into another laughing bummer.

Although the whole thing was quite funny, we both now agree that it’s pathetic that we, nursing students, can’t even tell a female pig from a male pig. And now our fellow classmates and professor think we’re crazy.