When the Smoke Clears

Back to work yesterday for a little bit. I was feeling a good bit better, thank you, modern science, for an array of antibiotics. While I was doing a few things to get ready, I also had an opportunity I could NOT pass up. Even though I answered all my calls and emails, I ended up playing a little hooky.

A good friend of mine, a Physical Therapist and Professor, will be starting a doctoral level class in the near future on cardiac issues and treatments in physical therapy. She wants to review the anatomy of chest with her class and asked if I would like to help in the dissection of the cadaver. What can I say? I’m totally in.

One of the nicest things I have seen at her school is the complete respect everyone involved has for the bodies and the people whom they represented. Both my friend and I admitted we were a little too selfish. I’m willing to donate my organs for transplants on death, but I still want my body buried. (though, again, I am still looking for vampire-like immortality if at all possible.) These people donate their physical forms so others, complete strangers, can study and learn and hopefully go on to help others whom they’ve never met.

“Have you ever cut open a human?” she asked. Well, not a dead one, no. Of course I had to quickly qualify that I was talking about minor surgical repairs. Strange how so many people get a touch nervous when they figure out there are little gaps in the story of my life we don’t talk about.

She was watching me at first, asking several times if I were alright. I suppose just about anyone could suddenly do the weak-kneed pass out thing, but I’ve worked on cadavers before, though not all my own prep work. I was quiet because I was amazed and honored to have this opportunity.

After saying a little prayer of thanks for the sweet woman, my friend let me do almost all the cuts from the initial big Y-incission to work on other layers. Properly dissecting a body for teaching includes a great deal of painstaking, delicate work. The major chunks of fat need to be cut away but then comes all the minute work removing other fat deposits without damaging any of the fine layers of connective tissue or membranes, or, worse, getting into the muscle fibers. I have to say I actually enjoyed that. It was a chance to give my surgical delicacy a workout, for hours.

The human body is absolutely a gorgeous thing and a wonder to begin to try to understand. Each muscle is there with a purpose, crossing over others, serving several different processes. Connective tissues grow in varied striations as they move from rib to rib to provide better flexibility in breathing.

My friend brought along some of her dissection and anatomy books so I could reference, and she’d quiz me along the way as well. Of course, I had to turn the pages with some big tweezers since my gloved hands were a little… messy.

Another reason she brought me along was so I could do the nasty parts, like the cutting away with the bone saw. “Whatever you do, don’t open your mouth,” she warned. We were setting everything up to be a multi-layered teaching scenario, which meant avoiding cutting through many places, laying or pushing tissues aside to be replaced, which also signaled a need to be even more careful with each knife stroke, each pull, each movement.

Once inside the chest it was easy to find tar deposits on the surfaces of her lungs. She was left handed, most likely. That was the hand with the nicotine stains on the fingers. A couple of the black spots were larger than others, and more solid, the start of cancerous growths on the lung surface. Later, my blog-daughter managed to come by. If anything hadn’t convinced her to not smoke, this seemed to work.

After finally labeling all the appropriate muscles, tendons and other pieces, we folded each layer back. I found myself resting my hand on this fine woman’s forehead a number of times as if she could feel the care and thanks I had for her, the assurance that we were learning more about her but knew enough to know she was a generous soul and her donation was not in vain.

I wonder about the thoughts in the minds of those learning on cadavers hundreds of years ago when there was more faith in the supernatural, far less atheism, when the soul was a known fact, when the body was riddled with unknown and occasionally evil humors. Would I have held the same fascination and respect were I alive back then? I would hope so. It’s part of the reason the Hippocratic Oath for physicians was so significant. Other people knew bodies and studied them well. Often undertakers were seen as the one in the town with the most medical knowledge. They could help, but they were also employed by the governments and leaders as professional torturers. While the soul does not leave the body easily, a clumsy torturer could kill someone too early for the satisfaction of the interrogator or prince. Other times torture-until-death was the goal, but it needed to be as prolonged as possible. Someone with a strong understanding of anatomy could cause tremendous, irreversible damage and pain for days if need be while keeping the subject alive and conscious. Amazing how deliberately cruel humans were to each other as a matter of daily course.

Such musings passed through my head all day as I worked removing tiny pieces of fat and exposing delicate, fragile muscles of the neck for easy identification.

As we wrapped her hands and feet and then covered her again with the shroud and sprayed her down, my friend turned to me and asked, “In two weeks we’ll be farther along in the course and I’m going to want to get into the heart and some of the other organs. Interested?”

Consider it scheduled on my calendar.

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