Elizabeth Foster, or Liz, a senior and human-phys/dance double major, is a TA for Friday afternoons in a cadaver lab. She invited me to come with her, and I over-enthusiastically responded yes. Her friend Christi Hutchinson, also a senior and human physiology major, decided to join as well.
“Are you ready?” Christi (or Liz, I can’t remember now) asked me as we approached the door to the cadaver lab, which is right by the science library in the basement of Onyx Bridge.
I honestly wasn’t sure. I’ve seen blood and guts on TV of course, and I’ve been to the Body Worlds exhibit at OMSI, but I’ve never seen a real dead human body before – much less a dissected one.
It was when I actually held a heavy, brown, wrinkled human brain in my hand and listened as Christi showed me all the lobes that it hit me – these cadavers were not just movie props. They were human beings. While Liz was helping students find various nerves and inner structures, Christi showed me the cadavers.
First I met Duke. Duke is a 63 year old male whose cause of death and weight I didn’t know because the name tag had been lost. Nevertheless, Christi casually moved Duke’s ribcage aside to show me his diaphragm, sternum, kidneys, intestines, and appendix. Nothing was like I imagined it. Everything was a monochromatic range of brown and gray, with occasional splotches of green from the bile in the gall bladder or black from cancer. The appendix was a tiny little blob I would not have even recognized as a separate organ, and Christi told me that no appendix is alike.
Then I got to meet Mabel, an 80 year old woman who died of a “cerebral vascular accident,” (CVA) which is like a stroke or aneurism. You could see on her brain were the CVA occurred – it looked like someone had, for lack of a better term, gored her brain. Also the left side of her face was smudged with black.
Isis, the youngest cadaver, was 51-years-old when she died of lung cancer. She also had part of her jaw removed and a misshapen nose – most likely due to drugs. You could definitely tell that cancer had plagued her. Her lungs and few other organs were completely black.
The only time I really got uncomfortable was when I saw a face. The cadaver’s name was Anubis. He is an 85-year-old male, 5 feet 10 inches tall, and died of “chronic heart failure.” He was lying on his stomach, but didn’t have skin. Christi was showing me his spine, when I noticed his head was turned towards me…and he still had a face. He had a beard, eyelids, skin, eyebrows – everything that makes a face a face. I had to ask Christi to cover Anubis’s face while we were talking, because it was making me so uncomfortable. Fortunately both Liz and Christi informed me that this was common, so I didn’t feel too disrespectful.
The whole time I was in complete jaw-dropped awe. Students were hurrying around me, desperately comparing skulls, scalps, and brains to pictures on posters and in textbooks. Christi was spouting off so much information about the human body I can barely remember half of it. It was amazing to listen to someone so knowledgeable and who was only a couple years older than me.
I met one of the students who was trying to find a certain nerve in Duke’s empty skull (Duke’s brain was being used by other students), who was not an undergrad at all – he decided to do something different and become an occupational therapist. I asked him how he felt about dissecting a human being.
“Studying is taking away from the shock,” he said.
Nearing the end of the lab hour, Christi decided to start closing up shop by spraying the cadavers with a mixture of chemicals that had Downy laundry detergent in it. The spray keeps the cadavers from drying out during the year, and it masks the pungent scent of formaldehyde.
“I can never use Downy,” said Christi.
The last thing I asked both Christi and Liz was, in my opinion, the most important one of all:
“Do you think the cadavers come alive at night?”
To my imagination’s dismay, they both answered no. But Christi did say that when she’s in the lab alone, at the computer, she turns around occasionally, just to make sure.