This is the End....

Tomorrow (monday) is our last official cadaver dissection. Wednesday we'll mostly be working with a model (apparently not easy to see structures of the ear since they are encased in so much bone and are so small anyway), and friday is review - then our final exam. This means that after tomorrow, there will be no more cadaver. No more suspicous fluids oozing off the table onto my scrubs. No more pieces of fat flying off scissors or scalpals onto my face. No more hair smelling like death (which I only seem to notice right before going to bed, which makes for some fun dreams, let me tell you). The hallmark "medical school experience" will be at an end.

Overall, gross anatomy has not been as bad as I thought it would be. You're probably thinking, "She got cadaver juice and materials on her FACE, she had to stop eating lasagna and meat for a month because it reminded her of her cadaver, she had to BISECT her cadaver, including the HEAD, give it a pelvic and anal exam and pull out the prion-infested, slightly gooey brain from the skull. How much worse could it have been? How bad DID she think it would be??" And you would be right - we did pretty much everything you could possibly do to a cadaver short of eating it (purposely) or setting it on fire, and every dissection involved breaking all sorts of social taboos. Thou shalt not cut up a body like butcher meat. Thou shalt not insert thy finger into a cadaver's privates. Thou shalt not apply a band saw to a cadaver, period. One of our lab instructors came by and asked us, "is there anything that you wouldn't do to this cadaver if it was instructed in the lab manual?" Anatomy partner Mark said, "well, no, unless of course you wanted us to stick our fingers up her anus." To which our instructor replied, "Oh, well actually, that's going to be part of next week's lab." "Well, then," Mark replied, "No, there is NOTHING we won't do."

But the part of gross antomy that I am referring to being "not so bad" was the emotional aspect of it. I thought that every day I had dissection was going to be a battle for me - a battle with the part of my conscience that screams out: "Cutting dead people is BAD!". Yet luckily, and perhaps disturbingly, my own desensitization to the whole taboo of cadavers progressed remarkably rapidly. By the end of the first week of gross, I no longer got nervous before lab, no longer felt nauseous and freaked out at the site of the cadavers, and no longer kept thinking of good excuses to get out of doing anatomy. It's amazing how quickly that happens - transforming from that person who thought kissing your dead grandma goodbye at a funeral was beyond the beyonds to that person who could eviscerate a corpse.

So, goodbye gross, and goodbye cadaver (which I never could bring myself to name) - thanks for the amazing experience.