The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [27]
ONE CANNOT PICTURE the path of a pill through the body without studying the mouth and throat. Which means seeing the cadaver’s face, something we had managed to avoid until now. Though I’m not looking forward to this unveiling, I am curious, frankly. Over the past eight weeks, I have constructed a mental image of this frail tiny old woman. I am sure Massoud, Laura, and the others have done the same. Unlike other groups in our lab, though, we have never named our cadaver; that seemed inappropriate somehow. Perhaps my lab partners thought as I did: How can you name someone without looking into their eyes? How can you ever thank them?
Massoud lifts the cheesecloth veil, folds it back over her hair, and takes a step back. Before us is not a face like any we could have imagined. Instead, we are looking at what an anatomist would call the underlying anatomical structure of the anterior aspect of the head. Translation: a face without the skin. Like all of the cadavers in the room, our body had been partially dissected in another class, but none of us had anticipated the extent of that work. The eyes are closed and intact, as are the lips, but the fat that typically pillows in the cheeks has all been cleaned away. What remains is a mask of musculature, forehead to chin, ear to ear. Running over this is a latticework of blood vessels (empty of blood), facial nerves, and lymph ducts, all in faded shades of white. The dissection is flawless, worthy of a fine-ink drawing by H. V. Carter, and, as Gergen is quick to point out, way too good to have been done by a first-year pharmacy student. Our job for the first hour of lab—identifying specific parts of the face, such as the nerves behind a blink and the muscles that make a yawn possible—has been made textbook-easy.
In front of each ear we find a body part that almost begs a description in the form of a riddle: what lies unseen just under the skin of the face and produces a clear, tasteless, odorless fluid? If you answered, salivary gland, you are half right, but if you said, parotid gland, you’re dead-on. The parotid, the largest of the three pairs of salivary glands, is surprisingly huge. I lift my fingers to my face just to confirm that I have a pair, and feel a distinct padding over the back curve of my lower jaw. I had always mistaken this for facial fat when, in fact, these are saliva factories. They provide our natural mouthwash, make it possible to lick our lips, and play a major role in the ability to taste. At the same time, they can be defeated by a saltine and, when their function is inhibited by certain medications, can cause dry or “cotton mouth.”
To locate the next several items on our lab list, we have to turn to Dana, who arrives at our table with a very large sealed Tupperware container and the sound of sloshing. She first warns us that what lies within may be upsetting to see. Even so, I am nowhere near prepared for what follows. Setting the lid to the side, Dana reaches down with gloved hands and lifts out what I can only describe as a horror: a severed head, split clean down the middle. A human profile from the inside out. I can see between her carefully placed fingers that the face, male, is intact.
“This is a hemihead,” Dana says, as if making a formal introduction. “Sometimes it is called a sagittal section or a median section…”
The visual drowns out her words.
Clear embalming fluid flows down the exposed lobes of the brain, through the nasal labyrinth, down the throat, and over the edge where the neck ends. Dana waits for the last drops to drip off and sets the head face-side-down onto a towel draped against our cadaver’s lower legs.
Amy and Gergen physically turn away from the scene, and I think, Well, that’s a mistake;