Prologue and Day One

This afternoon (Saturday) I spent three hours examining a few cadavers. None of my group showed up despite three of them saying they would be here this afternoon… ‘Oh well.’ It was quiet, as I was the only one in the giant white room that could be a supermarket butcher shop at first glance. I spent my time re-doing the last two labs on my cadaver (a 61 year old woman) and two additional male cadavers. But I’ll get to what I saw today later – I should start to bring you up to speed on the first two weeks worth of class.

Prologue – I study fishes, Recent and fossil ones. My favorite group to work with is the batoids (sharks, skates, and rays) – yes of crocodile hunter death fame, please can we drop that now? It’s not so easy to get a job as a fish freak, however, so to make myself more marketable, I challenged myself to study human anatomy. With that tool in my belt I open up a few more doors for teaching opportunities (e.g., comparative evolutionary anatomy). But I am a PhD student in a geology department and there is no medical school at my university, so I finagled my way in to my undergrad institution as a non-matriculated grad student. I arrived there a day before classes started, nervous and high like the first day of kindergarten. I picked up textbooks, two pairs of scrubs, a lab coat, and a copious amount Kimberly-clark Safeskin Purple Nitrile Gloves, size small. I was going to cut up dead people the next day…

Day one –My enthusiasm began to manifest itself as migraine and nausea – boo to that. I didn’t eat a good lunch for fear that I would ‘lose it’ upon opening up a body bag containing one human cadaver who bequeathed his or her body to anatomical study. I had no idea where to go because I was not part of a program (OT, PT, PA, etc.) so I was not on a mailing list and attended no orientation. Instead, I found my undergrad advisor and she said we’d walk downstairs together for lecture. Lecture lasted one hour and it mostly pertained to logistics. But lab, however, that was hardcore right away. I changed quickly into said scrubs, gloves, and labcoat and got prepared to cut.

Bodies were face down because it is most efficient to work on the back and back-muscles first. Most of the students, including myself, were grateful for this because without faces it was much less personal than it could have been. Slice one, straight down the spine. Time to remove the skin from the back and take a look at some muscles! It was emotionally much more easy than I thought it would be. I even tolerated the smell very well. So prone to migraines as I am, I was sure I would rather die than be there within a half hour, but adrenaline kept me in the game and I was a dissecting fool.

All I really remember of my lab group that day was one girl repeatedly saying, “Doesn’t this make you never want to eat fat again?” – You see, Lady P (we were at table P and affectionately named her P for the time being), ‘P’ was a big woman – Truthfully, we weren’t even sure if ‘P’ was a woman. For all we knew, we had a transgendered individual and weren’t prepared to make any assumptions. But ‘P’ was bigger than some, and thus a little oily and rather moist. Ewww you say – well, yes, but I am obliged to ‘P’ because it makes differentiating layers a little easier as we are not working with people-jerky as some unfortunate students are this summer.

OK… I think I’ll leave you with that image for now. I’ve got a date tonight – with Harry Potter :-p