Anatomy

Today was the first day of anatomy. More specifically, today we started cutting up people. It’s supposed to be the course that makes you FEEL like a medical student, because it is the hallmark course of a medical education, a rite of passage, steeped in the tradition of grotesque assailings on the senses. I certainly haven’t felt like a medical student so far. It’s all just been more biochemistry, yucky chemistry, in the same lecture hall, day in and day out. Finally I feel like this is something more suited to me. I hope my combined paramedic knowledge and time in anatomy lab from last year gives me a small advantage over my classmates. They all seem to know everything about microbiology and biochemistry because that’s what most of them majored in, while I run around in circles trying just to keep up. I’m tired of feeling stupid. I want this to be MY time. They picked me to be in medical school because of my background; it’s about time it came in handy somehow. So far, it seems promising. My first trick was instinctive - breathing through my mouth so I won’t gag on the smell.

My person died just three weeks ago. They preserved her not with formaldehyde, but with some new chemical that they are trying out. One of my classmates is very pregnant and can’t participate in lab until she has her baby, because inhaling formaldehyde while being with child is not the best idea. The reason behind the new chemical is to get away from formaldehyde and to something safer. Great idea, but the stuff doesn’t dry out the cadaver like formaldehyde does. Consequently, our lady is very juicy.

We started with the thorax (the chest), and began by cutting the skin over the breastbone. But wait! The incision was made by scalpel. This is huge! The scalpel is a forbidden tool for paramedics. The general school of thought in EMS has been that scalpels are for doctors, and needles are for medics. Give 'em huge needles, but by God, don't give 'em scalpels. Knowing the lot that make it into the paramedic field, maybe that's not so unwise. So anyway, today’s exercise with the scalpel should have had much gravity. Actually, it was like using an Exacto knife to cut open cardboard boxes. I don’t see what the big deal is. So the incision went. Our lady had quite a bit of fat. It looks like yellow blobs under the skin. It took a long time to scrape the fat off the appropriate layer of membrane, peel it back, dissect the breast, which is just a big hunk of more fat with some stringy stuff in it, peel back the breast, peel back the muscle, first the pectoralis major then the minor, to reveal the ribs. The firefighter was nominated to saw through the sternum. Because, of course, firefighters saw through people’s chests with hack saws all the time. So I dove in. As I sawed, the juice started pouring out all over the place. There was slight pandemonium as my groupmates ran to get the turkey basters and plastic tubs to keep her from flowing all over the floor. Scheduling the first anatomy lab to be AFTER Thanksgiving was probably by design. The more I cut, the more she leaked. But we completed our task, which was to cut through the ribs and the sternum to remove the “lid” to the chest cavity. Just think of cutting the top off a pumpkin to expose the inside when you make a jack-o'-lantern, and that's kind of what the objective was. It's pretty neat in there.

When I took anatomy last year, I remember getting all spiritual about the whole thing. The dissections were all done for us ahead of time because we were just undergrads, so mostly we just moved things around and pointed and poked. But once all the organs are taken out of the body, you realize that the body is truly a shell. Where is the soul? Is there a soul? What is the person thinking as we cut her up? Is there such a thing as bodiless thought? Is it an "it" or is it still a "she"? Is she watching us? Where would she be watching from, still inside the body, or floating around above us? Or maybe from below. Or maybe through one of us. Before she died, did she imagine she was donating her body to more serious, appreciative, thoughtful, mature students than us? Did they assure her that her body would be treated with the utmost respect, when really we laughed about how we couldn’t tell she was a she until we checked between her legs because her breasts were so flat? Is tasteless humor as a coping mechanism disrespectful, or is it acceptable because most people understand that it’s a shield from the strong emotional response that dissection elicits?

So far, anatomy is creating more questions than answers. I haven't really answered those questions I had from lab last year. This time, it is more involved, because we are actually starting with whole bodies and doing the dissections ourselevs. Perhaps I will become more spiritual, perhaps not. All I know is that I was starving by the time I was done.