I handed her the humungous gardening shears and watched as she snapped through each rib providing access to the silent heart of our cadaver. Abruptly, the fire alarm rang out cutting short the most physically taxing day of our yearlong anatomy lab course. Once we had evacuated, firemen streamed into the building, and I wondered if my lab-mates were also thinking about the horrific scene these men would encounter as they checked each room for stragglers. Garden tools rested on the half open chests of 24 lifeless bodies, globules of fat previously stripped away dripped into buckets below each lab table, and black plastic bags covered the faces of the anonymous men and women who had donated their bodies to medical education.
In elementary school, I was deeply afraid of all things related to death and dying. At night, I pulled my sheets up tight around my neck for fear that if there were any wrinkles left in it, it would look like a shroud and I would die in the night. I hated my bureau because it was big and rectangular and therefore looked exactly like a coffin. At Sunday school, I could not drink from the water fountain because the water had certainly passed all the corpses in the graveyard on its way into the church. So, suddenly encountering dozens of pale, stiffened bodies, I thought to myself, “Remind me again, why did I decide to go to medical school?”
As the fire trucks pulled away and we readjusted to the pervasive smell of formaldehyde, I thought about how quickly I had accustomed myself to slicing and combing through the unfamiliar territory of the human body. I was so fascinated by each new discovery that I forgot to worry about the proximity of death. Sometimes by the time I had changed into my scrubs and arrived at the dissection table my lab partners had already started and were ready to drill me on the day’s new terminology. “What’s this?” Mara asked, using her forceps to gently lift a white string running from deep within the neck down to the diaphragm. “The phrenic nerve?” I offered hopefully.
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