The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [71]
“No idea.”
“Right here”—I point to the spot—“where it joins the internal jugular and becomes the brachiocephalic, which feeds right into the, the…?”
“Superior vena cava!”
“Perfect,” I say, only now realizing what is going on here: I am actually teaching anatomy to these students (med students, no less), something I would never have imagined myself doing six months ago.
At 2:30, Kolja and I return to table 24, where we find Dana coaching David and Alex in the final phase of removing our cadaver’s lungs. One moment the organs are inside the body, and the next, boom, boom, David and Alex are each cradling one, looking like the proud papas of lumpy gray twins. I congratulate the pair.
The same scene is playing out at tables all around us, and by now, the energy in the room is through the roof. It is hot and sweaty, even by the window, and as I take Erica’s spot at the cadaver, I find that we are standing almost butt to butt with students at the table behind ours. If this were a reality show, it would be called Extreme Anatomy or Speed Dissecting, and most viewers would find it appalling. But I would not want to be anywhere else but right here. These med students are so quick and keen and hungry to learn. Even Kolja is catching up with the pack. He is a fearless dissector, as it turns out. For this second hour of lab, he and I are stationed at the abdomen, and Kolja has already uncovered two difficult-to-find arteries embedded in the dark, oily folds of the mesentery.
Inches away, Erica and Marissa are working feverishly on the thorax, having picked up where David and Alex left off (they are now at the prosection table). At one point, Kolja and I stop to watch as Erica slices through the pericardium and Marissa carefully uproots the heart from its bedding in the chest. Rather than put it aside, Marissa, aware that our cadaver died of heart disease, holds on to the organ, turning it over in her hands, examining every angle. I can tell that she is looking at the heart with the eyes of a future doctor, a healer, trying to see where the organ broke.
This had definitely been a momentous day for her, Marissa tells me later in the afternoon as we are cleaning up. “I’d taken an anatomy class but never done dissection before,” she goes on to explain. “I thought I was going to hate it, but”—she stops and, as if confiding a secret, adds in a whisper—“I loved it. I totally loved it.” Marissa looks out the window for a moment. “It’s funny, I came into school thinking I was going to go into pediatrics, but now I don’t know. I…I think I might like to do cardiology.”
Out in the hall, I chat with other students and repeatedly hear the same refrain: they liked dissecting, they liked it a lot, which is something I do not remember ever hearing said with such enthusiasm in the other anatomy classes. But then, of course, these are budding doctors. The body—in all its fleshiness, complexity, gruesomeness, and beauty—speaks to them, sings to them, in a distinct and powerful way. My favorite remark comes from Rayuna, an Indian woman with the carriage of a ballet dancer, who tells me with infectious delight: “It’s really crowded in there,” referring not to the anatomy lab but to the abdominal cavity. “Amazing, just amazing, how everything twists and turns and wraps around.” She pauses, as if picturing a whole body in her mind. “It was so cool to see inside.”
At least one student hadn’t been quite so wowed. Blake, whom I find sitting on the floor slumped against his hall locker, looks totally drained by the experience. After a friendly hello, I ask what had surprised him most about his first day of lab.
“That my cadaver was a woman,” he replies without hesitation.
Of all the things I might have expected him