My difficult class

When it was rolled out in its giant metal- lidded gurney the cadaver looked like some macabre dish. A sweet but paradoxically unpleasant smell infused the compact lab space crammed with 30 over eager forensic pathologists, physician assistants, surgeons in the making and me. I had spent several months agonizing over whether I could or would take this class, "Advanced Human Cadaver Anatomy" and had finally taken the plunge.

For someone who's never been to a funeral, hunted or even gutted a fish this was a big step in my path towards a medical career. Adorned in our internet purchased scrubs in a variety of strange colors we clutched our dissection tools now clean and shiny, soon to be left abandoned and disgusting in a lab drawer never to return home with us. We watched as romantic images of television medical shows; CSI, Quincy, Grey's anatomy dissolved into celluloid puddles as the stainless lid is slid back by our instructor to reveal. A person, yet not a person, something to be dismantled but still respected, something like me and yet lifeless as a paperweight. A slim man maybe in his late 40's, face and genitals carefully obscured with paper towels, a pinkish gray, and a few crude tattoos. What is his story? How did he die? Why would he let himself go through this? We never found out, no name, no cause of death, just conjecture as we mutely and determinedly worked our way through the skin, tissues and organs like timid explorers in an undiscovered land.

It cannot help but sound like we were a dispassionate and gruesome group of students, but it was handled with such matter of fact methodology that after a while it felt like a mechanic taking an old car apart, rusty bolt by rusty bolt. On occasion a student would be asked to perform a particularly gruesome task, and there were always a few gung ho volunteers, future surgeons, I'm sure. One hot stuffy day as most of us worked on a lab exercise, a thin, pierced and tattooed girl slowly and with painstaking accuracy removed the top of the cranium with an electric bone saw. Whirring like a nightmarish dentist drill it coated the whole room in a soft snow of fine bone dust. Once the bone was removed a quick cut through the optic nerves and spine allowed the brain to be removed to sit on a metal tray like a gray head of broccoli.

Eating was difficult at the lunchtime following dissection, even resorting to wearing three layers of latex gloves during class, and the space suited fumbling that ensued, did not entirely preclude the smell of formaldehyde on the hands. A breakfast burrito or other meaty snack from the college cafeteria looses its attraction when the olfactory senses are assaulted just as it reaches the mouth.

What did I learn from all this? I learned how incredibly strong the human body is, the effort required to separate muscle strands or joints is gargantuan. If you ever look in an anatomy book, everything is delineated by bright colors, veins in blue, arteries in red, muscles a rosy crimson color, organs in hues of blue and pink. Not so in reality everything just blends together in one gray-pink mass, making it challenging indeed to differentiate an adductor longus from an adductor brevis, or a vein from an artery.
My squeamishness overcome, at least about a corpse, perhaps I can face the other challenges of a medical career; compassion and care for those like all of us who are a few missteps away from quitting this mortal coil.