Coping with Cadavers

For the last two months I've spent almost all my time with the same few dozen people, and, a few dead ones. The alive and kicking group are my graduate school classmates. They're fabulous. I've been trying to downplay our age difference, mainly so they don't ask what it was like to watch original episodes of Seinfeld. Lord knows I would never mention that I sat in the front yard with my Dad a few minutes after watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, so we could wave at him and ask if he had had enough to eat that night. I was a babe, but I remember it.

Just so you know this might get lengthy......but I can't help it.

So, since June 7th I've spent most of my time with young men and women who may have studied high school history about when Reagan was shot.....not JFK. And I couldn't have enjoyed it more. They're vibrant, incredibly smart, big-hearted, laugh easily, and have minds that instantaneously process complex bits of information (which is both admirable, and makes me a little pissy). A few may have married too young, as I did, and a few probably like to party too much for their own good, but all of them, I am really fortunate to be with. And it's a good thing. We're stuck with each other for two years.

"Stuck" isn't really the right word. That's more for unusual Uncle Al. "Interested" is one, better word. My classmates are diverse, and it's incredibly cool to learn what they did before landing in this graduate program, and how they got here. "Humbled" is another, better word. My mates seem to be in a perpetual mind-in-full-sponge-mode groove, and I feel like a clanky "uh, but wait..." screech owl. I was always one of the annoying straight-A students at any grade level, and the top-tier performers in my corporate life. I sailed through last fall's prerequisite courses (which feels like a decade ago at the moment). But the adjustment from that track record to this full-time adult student/life performance, has been humbling. Both my mentor and academic advisor - who are each also 30/40-something career-change-with children people - shared how their adjustment to this program was as funky as mine has been so far. No excuses....these young men and women are intellectual studs, and I hope they're contagious.

Now, there's another whole category to describe these guys. "Fighters"? "Huge-hearted"? "Vocational soulmates"? "How's their lunch box so much cooler than mine"? I can't put my finger on it, but there's a deep, alive, love-of-live-and-others vibe across this group. For example.....I hope he doesn't mind but one classmate - let's call him the "Resilient as Hell K", is getting brain cancer treatments. He was getting chemo every two weeks throughout this intense summer agenda, and knocking it (all of it) out of the park. He still owes me a Five Guys burger (WITH, fries), but I think I owe him a little more. Other classmates, they're also managing families and paying mortgages. And others are still in that starting-to-build-a-grownup-life phase....which is hard to do. And while the under 30-somethings way outnumber the overs....the unders don't seem to care about age, and don't seem to care that some of us tend to look like soccer moms. But they do care about being in this program, and the patients they'll help soon. We all have that in common.....the need to help people grab back some of the most meaningful parts of their lives.

If that's not cool, I don't know what is.

Now the other group? The dead ones? They were, are, were, are....sigh....the cadaver donors in our anatomy lab. Which is where we spent 5-6 days a week, and a good part of each of those days. I've been married, I've had an intensely close relationship with someone I thought would be husband #2. I've changed diapers and survived toddler vomit and wiped poo-ey butts and blown clogged noses. I helped my Dad with, "ahem", in the months before he died. But I've never been as physically intimate with a human body as I have the last two months.....and with more than one (gasp), and, one was female (gasp).

It's hard to explain the cadaver lab. And it might be just as hard to explain how people cope with it. The first day was terrifying. Really, it was probably the 20 minutes before punching the secret lab code for the first time, that was terrifying. Pre-initiation visit things, and smells, build in your mind...scary, gory, horror movie special effect kinds of things and smells. But within a few minutes after meeting our dead instructors - I don't know what else to call them - and realizing that they wouldn't rise up from the gurney to grab and strangle us, it was KIND of, okay. The groovy music in the background didn't hurt. But not one of us really touched on that first day. A few maybe - me included - did on day 2. By the third day we were able to joke a little, and had acclimated to that singular smell, and had our hands pretty well covered in lab goop.

Daily, we learned more about our donors' lives what they had suffered with, and what ultimately killed them. Which was fine, if we didn't get too cozy. So we gave them nicknames. And then picked and probed and marveled, and learned. Muscles, bones, nerves, ligaments and tendons, organs, nerves, joints, arteries and veins, hearts and lungs, vertebrae, brains, more damn NERVES. Big Bert the Bricklayer and his descending aorta, and the "triple-A" that had sent him to the lab. Bert had been over 300 pounds while alive, and it wasn't hard to see the strain that had put on his body. Butt Guy was in telephone sales and had great musculature. I hope people told him that when he was alive. Skinny Minnie grandma had been an administrative assistant all the years she battled heart procedures, and cancer. She had petite everything, but something tells me that she was a top-notch professional and someone to contend with. And Juicy Jim....he was.....'enough said.

Other than that they were in Chris's lab, the one thing they all had in common was their human body. I can tell you, after having spent the better part of two months learning every part and relationship and function, that it's the most impossibly, beautifully-designed instrument. Ever. Without a bit of waste. Everything should be put together this fabulously and efficiently. Whatever your spiritual inclinations are, I wouldn't be a bit shocked if someone entered the lab a God/Higher Being/Intelligent Designer skeptic, and left it convinced otherwise. You want high-tech high-end sexy beautiful machinery designed by Man (uh, or Woman)? Go buy a Maserati. You want a high-tech high-end sexy beautiful instrument designed by God/Higher Being/Intelligent Designer? Look down. Or in the mirror. We are amazing. Value it.

So this summer, and these classmates, and this lab, became a weirdly intimate and kind of reverent place. And I started to become a different kind of professional.

Thanks Guys. Thanks, Chris.