Ready check

Original entry date: February 3, 2009

Today we met in Kevin's office once again. This time it was a rendezvous point before we found an empty room in which to meet in and discuss the readings, as well as watch a video. After this meeting we were to head on up to the prosectorium and familiarize ourselves with our surroundings and the cadavers.

Discussing the readings was interesting. The majority of us seemed to agree on various topics such as whether we were better off learning about anatomy via use of cadavers, whether we would donate our bodies to science post mortem if we were too old to be considered for organ donation, etc. Kevin asked us thought provoking questions such as why we feel there are people who are uncomfortable with the idea of cadaver dissection, why some people look at it as desecration of a corpse, etc.

Personally I think it's mostly a Western thing, as in most Eastern cultures, the culture doesn't shy away from the subject of death. The Western idea of sending our dead to a funeral parlor and prettying up the dead to look suitable for an open casket wake, after which follows the ceremony of burying them underground in a fancy casket is largely unheard of in the Eastern cultures. Outside of the Western world, families of the dead bathe them after death, anoint them with fragrant oils, dress them, and hold a wake inside the home for extended family and villagers to view. After the viewing, the dead are either buried or cremated, usually on a funeral pyre, and then the remaining bones are pounded into dust along with the cremains, and then scattered among the fields.

In many cultures, it is the family of the deceased that is responsible for tending to all the above arduous tasks. It seems prevalent in our Western culture that the dead are a taboo subject, that we outsource what Eastern civilizations have done for several millenia, the caring of the dead, to others who have the emotional capacity and fortitude to touch the remnants of what was once alive.

As a result, cadavers to us are part of that unspoken taboo, that IN YOUR FACE reminder that all of us will someday die, and that our remains are to be handled by strangers for proper disposal. Dissection does not mean proper disposal, and I think that's one reason as to why it's so forbidden, why to some people the subject is beyond reproach.

After the discussion we watched Kevin's movie of the human brain extraction, the same video he showed my Bio160 class last semester, so it was a nice way to break out old memories (I am a fan of bad puns). Following the video, we headed upstairs to the prosectorium to introduce (or in my case, reintroduce) ourselves to the cadavers.

Mike was the first cadaver we looked at. He's been there the longest, is the most handled and dissected cadaver, and looked exactly the same as I'd last seen him. Kevin said that he was desiccating, however, and it would be up to us to re-wet the cadavers when we were done with our days' work. We passed around his heart and lungs, looked inside his abdominopelvic and thoracic cavities, and we played the "Name this structure!" game as Kevin pointed to something and asked us to provide the proper nomenclature. I had a good amount of them memorized, and Susan kept smiling at me, as she did during Monday night's Kinesiology class. She said she's amazed that I retained so much information and she asked if I'd mind working with her this semester. I'd love to, I think she's a fantastic gal.

Kevin taught me well. What can I say? He laid out the anatomical terminology and physiology in an orderly fashion, and Jerry, Andrea, and I (sometimes with Tyler) sat at Starbucks numerous times outside of class hammering away at the information, dissecting it all on paper, cataloging it into our brains. We studied our asses off, and as a result Andrea scored the highest A in the class, and I was in 3rd place right behind her. I know my anatomy, and as Susan said, I should be proud.

We looked at the second cadaver. He's not as fully dissected as Mike was, and we were able to get a good glimpse of his face. His nose was pushed to one side, and flattened, probably during the embalming process. He had a device implanted right under the subcutaneous layer of skin in between the L axillary and L hypochondriac region which turned out to be used for chemotherapy injections. The man died of cancer that metastasized, but we didn't look up the death certificate to find out the specific type. His eyes were half open, and he had a pained expression on his face, with his mouth halfway opened, as if to silently convey to us in death that dying sucks, and you too will grimace as I am when it happens to you.

I am not familiar enough with him to name him yet, but I'm sure that will change as we work on him further.

The cadaver that was delivered to us shortly after Thanksgiving, the one of the larger woman, she lay untouched by us that day. We will look at her this coming Tuesday, and Kevin did say that he would need a lot of us to work on her just cleaning up fat and separating fascia from underlying structures.

We wet down the second cadaver and cleaned up the room. We hung up our lab coats and said goodbye for the day, with cheerful promises to see each other on Tuesday.

I had just finished reading a book called Body of Work by Dr. Christine Montross, which I found to be more along the lines of what we're doing as compared to the book Stiff, by Mary Roach. Stiff covered more ways in wich donor cadavers are used, whereas Body of Work was solely about the cadaver that was being dissected by the author and her lab partners in their first year of medical school. It's their journey of discovery with their cadaver, which they aptly named Eve (due to a lack of a belly button, which they said equals lack of umbilicus, umbilicus to placenta... which leads to what? God created Eve, Eve was not born to man nor woman). It was a touching book, one that mirrored many of the thoughts I harbor over what I am about to do, what I am about to experience in this class.

Many conflicts within my own code of ethics, my morality, my own beliefs of what becomes of our mortal coil once we shed our earthly bounds, they were addressed in this book. Maybe not by answers, but the fact that the author felt similarly as I did, even if she couldn't resolve her own personal conflicts, I find a comforting justification that what I am doing is for the right reasons.

I need to get a copy of that book to Kevin and hopefully he'll find time to read it. What few fears I had left, what little trepidation remained upon my signing up for this class, that book erased them, and now I look forward to my upcoming experiences with heart, eyes, mind, and arms wide open.

I am ready to learn. This is transcendence.

Hands

Original entry date: October 9, 2008

We looked at the cadaver again today, or at least a part of it this time. The arm and shoulder of the cadaver we looked at on Tuesday was today, disarticulated, and Dr. Petti brought it out to the front of the classroom so that we could look at the musculature of the arm, glenohumeral joint, and scapula.

The hand was only partially dissected, and the fingertips still had their skin and fingernails intact. With my gloved hand, I gingerly held it as we turned the specimen over to look at the muscles on the posterior aspect of the arm. The hand was stiff, cold, wrinkled due to preserving fluids, yet it was in every way human. I ran my thumb over one of the fingernails, even though I knew I wasn't going to get a capillary refill response. But the moment I did that, I was overcome with emotion. Dr. Petti came up to Andrea and I and asked what we thought.

I wanted to cry.

Now I'm a big girl, and I'm not emotional sort (yay for being a tomboy), but seeing the hand of this cadaver moved me. When this man was alive, those hands held those of the ones he loved, maybe they cradled a baby or two, caressed the face of his lifebonded, held flowers or kleenex for them, depending on the occasion. That hand maybe strummed a guitar, played piano, drove to endless school or sports functions for the kids, worked an entire lifetime at a job that allowed him to provide a life for himself and the ones he loved. That hand held on to somebody when they passed, and it probably held on to somebody as he passed. The hands, along with the face, are what make us human. Seeing this hand, even in death, affected me on a very deep and visceral level.

I didn't cry. I stuffed down that rebellious emotional streak and put on my professional clinical face as I curved my hand to the outside of the cadaver's hand. I told Dr. Petti and Andrea what I thought, and Dr. Petti said that yes, it is the hands and the face that make us human. His eyes lit up as he said that, as if I was the first in this semester to bring that up with him.

He then asked if we'd read the book Stiff, The Curious Life of Human Cadavers. I read it 4 years ago when it was given to me as a gift from a friend for Christmas, since I had decided to return to school to pursue nursing. As a recovering goth, I tend to get strange and morbid gifts from the loved ones, but I digress. In the book, the author describes what cadavers donated to science undergo, and she puts that human element back into the cadaver. She also points out how the doctors, students, interns, morticians, etc. who work with the cadavers don't go about it cold heartedly. The part of the book which stands out the most to me was the first part, where she was talking about heads that were cut off and placed into roasting pans for chickens because they were in the same size.

I gave away my chicken sized roasting pan the day I finished reading the book. Most people who know me know how I feel about decapitation. Something about it can turn my stomach, and if I'm not one to cry, I'm even more adamant about being one not to vomit. I think since puberty I've vomited about twice in my adult life. I can deal with evisceration, disarticulation, amputation, burns, decomposition, putrefaction, but not decapitation. It's something I have a very, very, difficult time dealing with.

I still think about the hand of that cadaver. He was a tall man in life, with long, well proportioned limbs and good muscular structure. We each held his heart, which was enlarged, as well as his left lung, his foot, and his brain. There was another wave of wonderment as I held his heart and brain... what kind of memories were stored in there and lost forever? Who was left on this earth that his heart once beat for, in a figurative sense? We did not see his face, but there was no need to. I already knew he was once a beautiful human being.

His muscular structures were are beautiful. Years ago I would have had nightmares about dealing with cadavers in the prosectorium, as I've seen too many horror movies in which the hands come back to life and kill the living. But as I held the hand of the cadaver, that fear wasn't with me. The only feeling I had was the small sadness in knowing that I would be one of the last to maybe hold his hand, and a deep sense of gratitude for his ultimate sacrifice after death. That sacrifice was in donating his remains so that students going into the medical field could learn about the human body.

Growing up Catholic, and having accepted other theories of death from various religions, I am ready to acknowledge that there is some sort of afterlife, and that something does become of our soul after we leave our bodies.

Wherever that man's soul is, I hope he can rest well knowing what kind of an impact he's had on the students in my class. What kind of impact he left on me. Somewhere in the world beyond the living, beyond the nether, I hope that soul understands that I am deeply appreciative, almost beyond words, for allowing me to touch his body to learn more about how human bodies work. Even though we will never meet in this lifetime, I hope I was able to communicate to his physical shell that I am thankful for his sacrifice, and that's why I cradled his hand in mine.