Dissecting a Cow's Eyeball!

Last month I drove to Hattiesburg, MS to attend a weekend class for the deafblind degree I am working on. We were required to dissect a cow's eye as part of our midterm exam. My cow's eyeball was huge, the size of the palm of my hand, and then attached to the eye was muscle and fat also! Disturbingly, there were also two eyelashes still attached that I could not pull off with tweezers.

We were instructed to cut the eye open, and find the lens inside the eye. When I cut the eye open, black gushed out. I asked the teacher "What is the black stuff?" and she looked at me as if I were kidding and said "Blood..." (as if she were saying duh...). That stumped me, and I actually said "Oh, humans have red blood, and cows have black blood?!" Bobby still can't believe I asked that, but really, how am I suppose to know about a cow's blood?! The teacher told me no, that we all have blue blood until it hits the air, then it turns red, I knew that... but what I didn't know and learned from her explanation was that blood turns black after someone dies! She asked me "Don't you watch C.S.I.?". Umm, no. I watch "Grey's Anatomy", and the blood is still red on that show... So I was humiliated and acted engrossed in my eyeball so attention would be diverted elsewhere. The girl next to me leaned over then and whispered "I am glad you are here, you ask the questions I am too afraid to ask!" That is because I lack the "inhibition gene" which most people do have, the one that prevents every thought that passes through my mind from being spoken! ;)

When I did find the lens, it was actually very cool. It was similar in shape and texture to a "smashed marble", it was even as hard as a marble. When I placed it over text, the lens actually enlarged the text as a magnifier would! This degree is definitely challenging, but fascinating...