Thawed out

I’ve got a new job. I’m now working in the marketing department at a hospital. After next week, I will have been there a month already. It’s exciting being in a hospital. I love my new job.

The director of surgery ran up to me one afternoon and asked, “what do you think of body parts?”

I told her I didn’t know, but that I was fond of my own.

She said not to worry, and to get the camera and some scrubs on right away. I would do fine. The proctor and the rest of the surgeons would be here soon, and needed me to take some photos of their new learning lab. The cadaver was thawing on the table and they would need to start soon.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be alright,” she said. “The body is decapitated. You won’t see its eyes. It doesn’t smell, either.” Relieved at the news, I scrubbed in.

Before the surgery started, I asked the guy who worked for the company that handled the cadavers about why it was decapitated. There’s a law in this state that you can’t transport an intact human body over the state line. So companies selling bodies that have been donated to science usually remove the head or the feet. Working with people’s bodies, there are lots of other crazy rules about how they need to be treated. You can’t really have any fun with them at all.

It’s a fact that most cadavers are sold in pieces. Like an old car, you can make more money on the parts than on the whole thing. So if you’re demonstrating a hand surgery, you would only want to buy an arm. Or for heart surgery, you would only need a torso. There are lots of other crazy rules about how bodies are handled. Our surgery was a hip resurfacing, and we needed as much body as we could get.

The surgery started, and I started snapping pictures. They unwrapped the unfrozen cadaver and lifted the sheet that covered it. When they opened it up, it looked like a big raw turkey. Since it was preserved, there was no blood. Everything was going fine, until the proctor announced that he was going to dislocate the hip.

The techs, nurses and observers in the room knew that this was my first time in a surgery. So they all looked at me as the doctor separated the bone from the wet socket.

It made a sucking sound, and then a moist *pop*. They laughed as I recoiled a little. I don’t think anyone noticed me when I heaved. I tried my best to hide it in a cough.

To tell the truth, watching Lisa’s Caesarian section was far worse. At least with the cadaver, there was no smell of cauterized flesh. There was no blood and I didn’t know the person it was happening to. Yesterday I was giving a tour in the operating room and saw a group of doctors working on a fat guy who was basically split open on the table. That was pretty gross.

My life is very different than it was a month ago. So many new things happening.

Betty is amazing. She is so interactive and interested in her new world. It’s frustrating because there never seems to be time for myself – to do most of the things I enjoyed before. Or for Lisa and I to have time to enjoy each other. But I wouldn't trade being a dad for the anything. There's something fulfilling about taking care of a whole living human person. This is true responsibility, and I feel so proud.