"Sophie"

Two very exciting things happened this week:

1) my favourite cousin/uncle has been in town and we have been catching up just about every day after school -that has been wonderful. so really, friends, come and visit me -it'll make my week =)

2) We started anatomy this unit (the post-first-final madness has begun!)... which means that I have started having labs with cadavers. I am holding nothing back because if only everyone could start to try to understand some of the mysteries of the human body, I think the world would be a better place. To try to understand, and to love your own body, your own person, your own mortality even, and to see it in others -even if only felt for a moment, should not be kept a secret.

The first encounter is pretty much branded in my memory (for now anyway). Tuesday, 1:30 p.m. I am nervous as hell. Walking up the last couple of steps to the second floor of Strathcona, my heart decides to take a little bounce on some invisible emotional strings, and I am surprised it did not lodge itself in my trachea. They told us that how we are with our cadaver, this former person who in death has become our first patient, will tell us a lot of how we will be with our future patients, what kinds of doctors we will be. That's enough pressure to give your heart springs, forget the fact that you will actually be using a scalpel (after today, I will have used both a 15- and 20-blade, forceps, bone clippers and my fingers, obvi) and cutting through human flesh.

We walk into a big room with over 40 bodies covered with forest green shrouds. I walk over to #39 -the one to which I was assigned, along with three of my peers. The Prof. does her demo and we watch on the screens and rise onto our tiptoes to see it "for real". And then, we remove the cover, and cut open the clear plastic encasement. I look at her hair and notice the grey roots, and short auburn-dyed locks, there is a cloth on her face, but I know she's a woman. Some of the others are not sure though (hey, obese and even overweight men might appear to have larger breasts, so this is not as obvious as it may seem). One of the lab techs comes around and pulls the green cover lower to "check" -yes, she is a woman... probably died about 60-something, but how is a mystery to us. Her abdomen is a redish-brown discolour, and her skin is tough and leathery. All I could think about was "What was her name?" I think they don't tell us for confidentiality purposes. Anyway, I am the first one to suggest a name for her. I am in awe of her. I want to know who she is, what she did, did she love, how amazing that she would donate her body to us, so that we could learn from her even in her death. She may not have been a teacher in real life, but to be teaching us now... Our anatomy Prof. is obsessed with telling us about the Greek and Latin origins of all the words we're learning, so I'm also remembering Greg Nagy's "Greek Heroes".

"I think I'm going to call her 'Sophie'", I say. It just felt right. Sophie from 'sophos' or 'wise' -like the greatest 'teachers' in history.

I made the first cut, going from the right-most part of the clavicle medially down to the sternum, then down the middle, and then laterally again from the sixth rib. I thank Sophie for what we're going to learn from her. You don't know how thick skin is until you know how tough it is to cut through it. It really is an amazing organ and no wonder it protects us from so many pathogens. I am not scared, and unlike some of the others, I do not feel badly or guilty for cutting -Sophie wanted us to learn from her body, including any mistakes along the way. It would be okay. I quickly learn how much pressure to apply so that I can penetrate the skin, without going too deeply, but also without going too shallow. I am completely focused -this is how I can honour her, to be fully present with her, and do my best by her.

We were supposed to peel off the layer of skin, but bright orangey-yellow adipose tissue (fat tissue) provides us with a challenge. It is tough to get through, and there is a lot of fascia, lots of connective tissue before you hit any muscle. As we make our way through it, I feel a sudden sharp jab on my left index finger, there is a slit in my glove and blood seeps out -one of my teammates has accidentally cut me. I am told to wash it under cold water and am given a Band-Aid. I had been so worried about cutting myself. How ironic that it should happen by someone else's blade. I come back and we are starting to see some muscle. We are all working systematically, more or less professionally, but it hits me here hard: it looks like meat. Just like red meat. Meat, meat. Human muscle. Meat, meat. The bones of the ribcage are shiny, covered in some kind of connective tissue. But the muscles -and we identify pectoralis major and minor, and the small muscles along the side of the rib cage, and a couple of nerves. And then we are done. Close up shop and wash the scalpels and forceps.

But all I can think of is how strange I feel in my own body. This human body, this human animal body. I keep running my hands over my skin, pinching it, making it tight. Does it feel like leather? And all I see is the meat meat that's inside, Sophie had meat meat inside. And all I can smell still is the formaldehyde, which reminds me of the meat meat inside Sophie. You don't realize the concept that humans are animals, just like other animals, so viscerally until you've seen it. We are so very mortal. So very, very mortal. And Sophie, in her mortal life, and in death, gave us this special, special gift -she did not know me, but she gave it to me anyway, she trusted me anyway, and taught me anyway -that we're all going to die one day, and that our muscles will look like meat, meat. And our 'who we are' will no longer be there, and if we all had the good sense of not only being helpful and useful in life, but to be useful in death too -to serve even in death -that is special indeed. I was such a daze. Did I even know what it meant to really make it count in this life and this world? Sophie, sophos. If it was ever possible to feel 'mortality', I felt it on Tuesday.