rhymes with cadaver

After a few months of looking at human brains, spinal cords (they are so much smaller than I thought they would be) and the odd human knee all out of context, we were finally led up to get the first look at our anatomy cadavers we will be using for the rest of our course. Now, I've already seen cadavers from the summer I took this course in Portland. Many people choose not to believe me when I say "it's not so bad." But it's not. Maybe a little surreal, but not gross.

They try to make it a little surreal, I think. The cadavers are kept in a special room down a special hallway that is always locked. To get to them you have to go up a certain elevator that opens into the locked hallway and then use a number code to get into the cadaver room. Room 666 in fact. The room is Kubrick orange inside and the cadavers are kept sheathed in heavy white plastic. Cadavers are hard to come by, and ours have been used for a year now. They don't stink, even like chemicals. I find the experience of studying them very humbling and intriguing. We're all just tissue in the end.

A new element in cadaver work for me will be the internal organs. Before we only looked at muscles and never even had to touch the cadaver if we didn't feel like it. Now, the rib cage has been removed, almost like the top on a children's puzzle to reveal the world beneath. I will probably feel weird picking up a rib cage to poke around in someone's heart. But after awhile you get used to doing such things and don't think about your own rib cage and how light it will feel if someday someone lifts it out of you.

I took a nude drawing class in high school and was very nervous about looking at naked people at first. But soon everything was just a line to draw and shade. And now, every thing is just an organ or tube to memorize. Because we're all just a collection of movable, beautiful parts.