Names

Original entry date: October 10, 2008

I live a haunted existence.

Between Nick's sudden death in May, and working with the cadavers now, I am reminded every day of my fragile mortality. We go through life weaving an intricate web, spinning our relationships, experiences, and memories into the delicate silk fibers, getting tangled up in some spots as we trudge along. It's a strong and sturdy web, but it can all be ruined in an instant.

I couldn't fall asleep easily last night, and whenever I'd find myself in the first fleeting seconds of slumber, an image of the cadaver's hand in mine would appear. In my dreams my eyes would trace the musculature of the arm and upward, to a disarticulated shoulder, and then further on to a face that did not belong. The face would be Nick's.

So here I am, sitting in Dr. Petti's Health & Lifestyles 101 class, halfway listening to him lecture, and at the same time allowing my mind to wander into the uncomfortable spaces its been occupying in the wee hours of the morning. I keep thinking about the cadaver arm, and the man it belonged to. The cadaver arm is the same one that we first saw in January, with Dan's class, from the man who was born in December 1919 and had a pacemaker installed.

I know not his name, simply his month and year of birth and death, and the primary cause of death. I know of his inside body workings, the shape and lay of his muscles, what the inside of his heart looks like, the delicate arc of his semilunar valves. I do not know what his face looks like, but the more I think about him, the more I wish to give him a name. I want to name him Mike.

I don't know why this name calls to me, but it seems to fit.

So lately I am haunted by Nick and Mike, for different reasons. I wonder how long until this feeling passes.

The Prosectorium

Original entry date: January 28, 2008

I'm in the Biology 230 class of Dr. Dan Trubovitz, at San Diego Miramar College. I enrolled in this class as part of the five prerequisite classes needed in order to fulfill the requirement for a baccalaureate program in the field of Nursing Science. In the winter of 2006 I took Chemistry 100 + lab, in the spring of 2007 I took Biology 107, in the winter of 2007 I took Biology 205 (general microbiology), and now I am in Biology 230, otherwise known as Human Anatomy. The only science I need after this for my core sciences would be Biology 235, which is generally known as Human Physiology.

Why Anatomy and Physiology are taught separately in the lower college divisions, confuses me.

The idiot bitch whom I caught passing notes about me in Bio107 is in this class, and she refuses to look at me. I would refuse to look at me as well if I left a note full of trash talk on the floor by the lab table right where the subject matter could easily see it, and then get chewed out for it once it was discovered. I spared her no mercy when I told her that as an adult, as a college student, and most importantly as a future nurse, she shouldn't be prejudging people by the color of their skin (which is what the note was about... one of my rare encounters with racism in America). She cried and later apologized. But now she sits here, one table away from me, and huddles in her corner away from my glances back towards her.

Dr. Trubovitz (whom I will hereforth refer to simply as Dan) went over the introduction to anatomy. What does anatomy mean? What are cells? What are cell systems? What are tissues? What are systems? I try to keep interested in class, and I took furious notes, even though I know the subject matter and remain one of the few people in the room who can confidently answer his questions regarding the very basics of organ systems.

He announces that we are dissecting rats, and we are to point out basic structures within the rats. Find the lungs, heart, liver, stomach, intestines, spleen, kidneys, and find several types of tissues associated with the structures. Mesentery proper, greater omentum, lesser omentum. The names are strange, yet familiar, and all my prior knowledge of the subject starts to wake from a long and deep slumber.

Some of the people in there who raised their hand and said that they were in the class to fulfill their prereq for nursing (sound familiar?) got squeamish and refused to touch the rat. One of the girls said that looking at dead things and their squishy organs grossed her out. She said that she wanted to work as an ICU nurse. Good luck with that sister.

After we cleaned up from our first day dissection, Dan took us into the prosectorium to look at the cadavers. Miramar is blessed with a good program (for a state community college) that allows students access to cadavers from a joint program with UCSD. Currently there are three cadavers in the back. Dan opens the door, invites us all to don gloves, and then goes towards the body at the end of the room and begins unzipping the body bag.

Students mill around, some look mortified at the prospect of being near a dead body. Some choose not to go into the room. I am at the front and center, gloves on and ready, and he removes the wrappings from the cadaver and begins to show us the body.

The cadaver is large. In life the man must have been about 6'1". He is lean, and the color of his flesh is rendered a weird shade of yellow-brown as a result of the embalming process. He has a visible pacemaker, and he was dissected enough so that we could look at his entire thoracic and abdominopelvic cavity. Dan passed around his heart for all of us to hold; it was a large, stiff mass of muscle, with white rubbery tubes that were the aorta and vena cava. The man was born in December 1919, and died in June of 2004 of congestive heart failure.

Five minutes later we left the room. I'm so weirded out from holding a man's heart in my hands, of seeing a cadaver that up close and personal, and the smell of the formalin lingers in my nostrils and throat. I have so many questions going on in my head that I can't even really think straight right now.

All I know is that lunch is out of the question.