What's inside the pig's heart!?

We, human-beings, indisputably, are mammal. According to the scientific researches, we can apparently find that the pig’s heart resemble the one in human. As a pre-medical student, we had a class, biological research, on Thursday, try to dissect the pig’s heart, and also analyze the vessels in the heart. If you do not dare see the bloody scene, you’d better stop reading the rest of the article. For us, who had anatomized so many animals, such as sharks, mice, and so. It was nothing more than a common thing to us. You might think we are so cruel, but only by anatomy could we learn more about the fantasy of the whole creatures. So get ready and enjoy the article that analyzes the pig’s heart.

At first, the pig’s heart was in a totally chaos situation because the lungs and tissues surround it, making it look like a big bloody flesh ball. Following the teacher’s advice, we start from the obvious aorta, and cleaning the tissues like fat or flesh out of the vessels. Then we forward to the pulmonary artery which stems from the right ventricle, and strip off the unwanted tissues as well, in order to view the vessel more clearly. It sounds like an easy task doing this; however, it took us more than an hour to finish this. As we carried on, we can observe that there was a branch near the end of pulmonary artery, connected with two lungs, indicating that the place is where they exchange the oxygen. Because our mission today was only clean the vessels out of tissue, the teacher asked us to cut the lung off from the vessels. Until then, all the arteries are nearly formed, while the veins were still bond by tissues. Time was running so fast, we then proceed to observe the coronary artery. It divides from the aorta to three other vessels and spread almost all the heart. By viewing the picture, the coronary arteries were under the white material, which is fat tissue, protecting it from the external hit.

Finally, the most exciting show came. We place the heart in a plane situation, and used the scissor to cut a little gap. From the gap, we kept on by cutting along its surface. After the procedures are over, we could peel it and place it open like a “heart mouse.” In the picture, we can see how the left atrium and ventricle, right atrium and ventricle, bicuspid, tricuspid, semilunar valves, pulmonic valve, papillary muscle…etc. We can also imagine how the blood flow: from the anterior and posterior cana vena converge to the right atrium, passing the tricuspid to right ventricles, also passing the pulmonic valve to pulmonary artery, exchanging blood oxygen, afterwards, flowing to the pulmonary veins, converging to left atrium, passing the bicuspid to the left ventricle, and then proceed to the aorta. It seems to be a long, long journey, but in fact, it happens in less than a minute.

After the class was finished, we were so tired as usual, for we had almost used up all of our energy into the anatomy. Thanks to it, I gradually realized how complex beings’ organs are, and could see a little more clearly how my life will be. As I was wondering, I coincidentally raised my head up. I found the sky was so blue and bright as if my future was shining.