The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [13]
Amy slides her finger into the center of the cut and folds back each flap, exposing the heart. She reaches for a larger blade. Amy looks so comfortable using a scalpel that I cannot resist asking if she’s ever thought about being a surgeon rather than a pharmacist.
“Not until now,” she answers with a smile.
Next, Amy slices through the six blood vessels entering the heart and the two exiting it. Then she puts down the knife, grasps the heart with both hands, and tugs, uprooting the organ from its bedding in the chest. She places it on a towel-lined tray to her left.
The human heart has four chambers, but it is not obvious from the outside where each is located. Six noses press in for a closer look. Subtle grooves on the exterior of the organ serve as landmarks, and we are able to orient ourselves. The right and left atria, as their names suggest, are the two cavities up on top. The right and left ventricles form the lower portions of the heart.
Amy proceeds with the final incisions. Using a fine blade, she makes a small doorway into the right atrium and, turning the heart over, a larger opening in the left ventricle. Our heart now has a front and back door, but there also seems to be a flooding problem. Dr. Rohde—Dana, as she insists we call her—has been observing how we are doing, and she suggests that someone take the heart to the sink and rinse it out.
I volunteer.
With an air of quiet ceremony, Amy places the heart into my gloved hands, and I instinctively draw it to my chest. My own heart instantly speeds up. The lab has never seemed more crowded, the distance to the big stainless steel sink never more vast. I feel as if I were carrying the most fragile thing in the world, which is silly, for our heart is already broken in a sense; our cadaver had died of heart failure.
Once I begin rinsing the heart, cradling it in one hand while rubbing it with the other, I relax. It is tough and rubbery. The aorta, the major artery emerging from the heart, is a severed garden hose. As I feel the smaller vessels, white and gristly like the roots of a turnip, I understand how the word heartstrings came to be, based as it was on the belief that stringlike tendons keep the heart in place and can be tugged or plucked like harp strings, eliciting different emotions.
What washes down the drain is a grainy brown paste, coagulated blood from inside the heart. I pat the heart dry and return to our table.
With Dana as our guide, we examine the four chambers in the same order blood passes through them, beginning with the right atrium. This is where blood is received from two veins—carriers of deoxygenated blood—the superior vena cava and the inferior vena cava. (Superior means topmost and inferior, bottom, terms that we would come across again and again.) The right atrium pumps blood into the ventricle beneath it, which pumps it into the lungs. Blood returns to the heart via the pulmonary veins (the only veins in the body that carry oxygenated blood) and enters the left atrium, which pumps it to its partner below. The wall of this last chamber, the left ventricle, is the thickest and strongest of them all; it has to be. With each pump, the left ventricle propels blood up through the aorta and out through the body’s miles and miles of arteries.
But before supplying blood to the whole body,