My heart will go on

Original entry date: November 13, 2008

Dr. Kevin Petti knows the magic wonder of the store known as Lucky Seafood, but not for the same reasons I am in love with that Asian supermarket.

I love Lucky Seafood for the cheap Asian goods I can find in there: spring roll wrappers, silken tofu, soy sauce, palm vinegar, nata de coco, the best cheap Asian butcher knives you will ever find, and a plethora of other goods I procure on a monthly basis when I want to get my Asian heritage on.

But Kevin knows of Lucky Seafood for the butcher shop, as it's a way to obtain cheap pig offal for purposes of lab and dissection.

This week, Kevin gave us hearts.

They were not the grayish specimens with the noxious smell of formalin and phenol, neatly shipped to us in a vacuum sealed bag. These hearts were fresh from yesterday's slaughter, still pink and red, with traces of adipose tissue surrounding the aorta and vena cavae. There was a slight meaty odor to them, something not unfamiliar when dealing with meat that has warmed to room temperature from the butcher shop. It was not an offensive smell, but when you have a sense of smell that's hypersensitive like mine is, it's something you want to get away from as soon as possible.

The hearts were interesting. Cutting into them felt no different than cutting into a pork tenderloin. Sometimes I fear that participating in dissections will turn me from a happy carnivore into a vigilant vegan, but that has yet to happen. It's just something I have to mentally come to terms with. I think my general squeamish attitude from it boils down to the fact that I will not eat offal. I am perfectly content with skeletal muscle meat, but any other animal parts are off limits to me. I especially detest liver. I've always hated liver, and my parents tried to feed it to me to help offbalance my iron deficient anemia as a kid, but after finding out what the liver's role in our body is for? Yeah, I'm definitely against it. I refuse to ingest something that is basically a filter for body toxins, and that covers liver, kidneys, and lymph nodes (yeah... sorry chorizo, you're off my list). Blech.

Kevin is a fantastic teacher. He makes me want to be a better student. That sounds so stupid and girlish, and eerily reminiscent of something Jack Nicholson said to Diane Keaton in As Good As It Gets. But it's true. I'm starting to believe that I can actually absorb all of this anatomy stuff, remember it, have my brain catalogue it for future reference, and not just have it regurgitate the information onto a test paper when the time comes.

I won't lie. There's buttloads of crap to have to memorize in anatomy. I am stressed out like you wouldn't believe.