Cadaver Day

09:30--It's cadaver day in Anatomy Lab.  Our first one, sprung on us with no warning!  Our new prof and two assistants just wheeled in three stainless steel cadaver tanks, and opened them wide.  The smell is phenomenally strong.  I can hardly bear it.  Blech.

12:35--The smell was worse than the sight of the bodies, which in itself was a little…  well, very disconcerting.  There were three cadavers, 1 female, 2 male, each in its own tank.  They were not completely submerged in preservative.  Rather, they lay in a shallow pool of it with towels draped over the body.  The towels absorb the preservative and distribute it across the ventral half of the body. 

The cadavers were not fresh--they seemed to be quite well-aged.  One male seemed to have been so long in service that his skin and linings and innards had turned dark brown.  The female seemed to be the freshest, with bits and globs of flesh still scattered here and there on the lip of the tank, across the towels, and on the blunt probes.  The other male was somewhere in between.

The two males had had their brains removed. Their heads had been sectioned midsagittally so we could see inside the oral and nasal cavities, as well as inside the empty cranium.  One male and the female still had intact eyeballs, though the male's were deflated somewhat, and the female's were still, erm, round and plump.  All had their tongues.  Not all had their teeth.  All were bodies of elderly persons.

Picking up a probe at the female cadaver, I was compelled to wipe it on the towel because I couldn't get past the fact that there were bits of greyish-pink human flesh sticking to it.  I wondered if anyone else in my group noticed the globs.  Three of my lab mates had their hands right in the cadavers, reflecting flaps of skin and touching the various muscles that we were studying today.  I was curious, but I couldn't quite bring myself to touch those bodies.  It was a little overwhelming in my mind, the smell was unbelievable, and I was, frankly, too grossed out.  Everything seemed like very pliable leather.

It was very difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that we were looking at dead human beings, once alive and breathing, now stinking and preserved in a foul, poisonous fluid for students to poke and prod.  The next time I renew my driver's license, I may reconsider my option to donate my body and parts.  Let my body, such as it is, maintain its dignity of form in death.