The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [69]
Speaking of which: I would love to spend more time with the Fabrica, but I have an anatomy class to attend. Pulling off my gloves, I am first puzzled, then slightly horrified to find that the fabric at the fingertips is dirty. Careful as I was, traces of the five hundred-year-old ink rubbed off. Or, to put it another way, traces of Vesalius rubbed off. Which almost makes me wish I had saved them. By the time this thought hits, though, it is too late. The cotton gloves are bound for Ms. Wheat’s laundry basket, and I am up in the anatomy lab pulling on a pair of rubber ones.
AS THIS IS my third first day in just six months, one would think the scene around me would be utterly familiar. Well, yes and no. The freshly polished linoleum gleams. The blackboards have been sponged clean. The lab guides at each station are centered and new. But what transforms the lab into something completely different is the suffocating crowd. It is two minutes past the hour, and 143 first-year med students are scrambling to find their assigned tables among the cadavers, squeezed in three to a row, eight rows long, as eight instructors direct traffic.
Luckily, I arrived just before the big crush of students and easily found my table, number 24, back in the left north corner. This is a great spot, as it’s right next to a bank of windows with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge. For the moment, there are just two of us here, me and a fresh cadaver—female, aged eighty-eight. Then, out of the sea of periwinkle and green scrubs, Dr. Topp appears with someone in tow. “Bill, this is Kolja; Kolja, Bill; you’ll be lab partners, okay? Great!” she says, and then, as though taken by a rogue wave, she is gone.
“Kole-ya, is it?” I say, pronouncing it just as Kim had.
He nods and, as if anticipating the question everyone asks, explains that, yes, his parents named him after Kolja Krasotkin, the young hero in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, but no, he is not Russian. He adds that he lives in Berkeley and just finished a Ph.D. in chemistry at U.C. Berkeley.
Kolja looks ten years late to class. He is about thirty years old, I would guess, and wears sandals and an oversized T-shirt instead of the traditional sneakers and scrubs. His long blond hair is pulled into a loose ponytail. But what is most striking about Kolja is how mellow he seems. In fact, I cannot help asking, “So, are you a med student?”
“Oh, yeah,” Kolja replies, “I just decided to head back to school.” He’s still looking for his niche, he adds.
Our four other table mates arrive all at once, and after quick introductions, we huddle around the lab manual. Our first act as a team is to split up. Every table of six is divided into twos, and each pair has a separate assignment for each hour of lab. We are to rotate at the hour and at the end of class come together and review. This tight schedule was born of necessity. Med students have so much to learn, so many subjects to cover in their first two years, that their entire curriculum is accelerated. For this anatomy course, three months of work is squeezed into six weeks. Today alone, they have to complete in three hours the equivalent of three separate labs.
First up for Alex and David is starting the dissection of the thorax, while for Marissa and Erica, it is a task just a few inches below: dissection of the abdomen. Kolja and I have