Medical school gives you a healthy appreciation for the strange and bizarre in life. Nothing's sacred. Where else can you walk into a room and find wrinkled, preserved heads propped up and sticking out of body bags with scalp + hair flopped over their faces. It's a scene out of a haloween costume store or a horror movie. Teh faces look like plastic halloween masks of zombies. Everyone just goes about their business in the lab and I just want to shout, "Doesn't anyone else think this is WEIRD?! Is anyone else disturbed by the fact that we're scraping and peeling the faces off these people?!" But no...nothing unusual here. I peer into our cadaver's body bag and see a head attached to a mangled torso that's missing most of its contents, 2 legs and a hemi-sected pelvis in a red bag, and yes a brain sitting in a little plastic bag by the head. But what can I do? So, I sigh and refer back to my anatomy book and start trying to sort out facial features from the mangled mess we've made.
This morning I saw my first 2 autopsies. It's not that I expected teh experience to be a pleasant one, I just thought it would be more interesting given my long standing interest in forensics and forensic pathology. It was just unpleasant. 3 bodies were rolled out in the basement 1 stroke, 1 possible foul play victim, and one guy who had died in the ER after being dragged by a car and being slammed into a telephone pole. I was suprised at how sick I felt during these procedures. I had participated in cadaveric organ harvests and numerous surgeries all summer, not to mention having taken apart an entire human cadaver. Nothing new here, right? Guess I was wrong. Autopsies are a cross btwn the cadaver dissection and surgery. You have all the blood and smells of the OR and the indelicate methods of the cadaver lab. There was lots of blood, metallic and bowel smells, and with one of the bodies the sweet/sick smell of the beginnings of decomposition. THe worst part for me is always the smell of bone dust. i just cant stand it! I get sick when i eat doritos these days. It was especially bad with the 2nd patient, bone dust + bowel + decomp smell all rolled into one. the Pathology assistant seemed immune to teh smells as he danced around to Simon and Garfunkle tunes as he unceremoniously took organs out, block by block and placed them in plastic containers and buckets. The bodies were soft and pliant (rigor mortis wears off in about 48 hrs, fyi) and jerked with eerie life like movements as the slices were made. The worst part was teh soup ladle used to scoop out blood from the cavities...yech...or perhaps the worse part was seeing someone's scalp peeled...I cant tell anymore. It's all just greusome. So I guess in summary...I think I'll leave autopsies to pathologists and participate in them as an avid viewer of such shows as CSI. ¶ 17:53