A brief memoir on cutting up dead bodies

Will two washing tablets and two cupfulls of perfumed conditioner be enough to get the stink out? Maybe three. Even as I pushed my stained-and-minging-with-blood-and-formalin labcoat into the washing machine, I felt a smile break somewhere inside me of how matter-of-factly I manage to go about my motions during the weeks of dissection. Maybe I really have taken the leap of being totally nonplussed about the whole slasher routine that unfolds through my fingers every morning. Strange what routine does to you. Which calls for a perfect reminder of the journey that’s turned me into this relatively hard-skinned butcher that I am today.

Signing up

However much this might surprise you, dissection at my med school has always been optional (blame the lack of funding and a renewed interest in empowering doctors with psychosocial crap in the latest white papers which don’t seem to mind if the newly graduated clinicians can’t differentiate between a nerve and a string of fascia). About a quarter of a cohort signs up for the intensive two week module every year and attends it in an anatomy lab where eight corpses lie covered on separate stretchers and each cadaver is shared between 6-7 people. With a brief intro in the morning and afternoon, 2-4 hour long sessions involve novice med students poking with their scalpels, scissors and fingers, laughing and grimacing, getting disgusted and awed in perfect tandem.

The first year

This is the year of the hype. The build-up. The tension and the anxiety. Its the year when you, for the first time, legitimately slash another person (albeit a dead one) to pieces. First comes the dreaded unveiling. Wrapped in two layers of white sheet, as the covers come untucked, the first thing to chill every bone of your body is the expression on the cadaver’s face. The first impression of watching someone frozen in a half-scream: the lips fixed open, only some creases and lines fixedly pronounced and the stiff half-open eyelids revealing an eye-less black nothingness isn’t admittedly a pleasant one. Top that with the fact that as you touch the shaved head, the sprouted hair feel as alive as your weekly stubble and the surreal moment of realisation of a key emotion felt is complete. Its the defining moment when you tell yourself that you are indeed governed by your biology. Life is finite, fragile; death is one of its biggest truths; and at the end of the day, the human body is basically a machine. After this brief 10-15 seconds of silent existential awakening, from which you are rudely awaken by the stench of the formalin and tissue, you begin the routine.

The first cut begins with you holding the scalpel in one hand, and shouting to yourself inside “Its alright, you are just cutting a non-living doll open” close to 30 times before the blade touches the ashen skin and just like that, you run your blade down like slicing away a birthday cake. The fact that no blood comes gushing out is a huge contributory factor in you getting “warmed-up” to this small miniplex of slaughter within the first half an hour.

In the first year we basically have to cut open the limbs which starts with first peeling the skin away after we have made the guiding cuts. You begin the skinning by first revealing a corner of the cut skin and pulling on it to let it tear away from the underlying muscle. The greasy layer of fat just beneath the skin and the sound effects of you cruelly ripping away the skin are just two of the things that make the squeamish around the corpse-table squeal and run. Still, of the two weeks, peeling the skin off remains an absolute favourite amongst the dossers of the groups. With one person holding fat pads and fascia layers with tweezers and the other casually slicing it all with his scalpel, its one of the few jobs that’s as smooth as applying butter on the bread, gives quick results and allows a lot of free mental bulk for chattering away to your heart’s content .

The first two days go about finding and naming every muscle and its respective tendon in the upper arm, then the lower arm, then the hand (skinning the palm and the fingers is strangely goosebump inducing), then the thigh and the lower limb along with the feet. The last two days involve butchering every bit of muscle and exposing the bones. And it doesn’t end there; to have a good look at the insides of the knee, hip, elbow and shoulder joints, the last day involves some serious pulling and jerking of bones to snap them out of place and poke into the gooey synovial joints.

7 more memorable things about the 1st year dissection:

1. Not having non-vegetarian food for the first week of dissection (its like your eyes and nose are stuck in a weird synaesthetic loop. You see any meat and you smell the stink of your anatomy lab).

2. Wishing you had bleach to wipe the foul smell away from your hand everyday at the washing-up sink.

3. Getting over-zealously confident in the 2nd week and accidently making a minor cut on your finger that makes everyone’s jaw drop with worry that you have contracted every virus on the planet. Subsequently, getting freaked out yourself at the possibility of what if you really have contracted any.

4. Coming home and explaining the tiniest gory detail to the family and then laughing at their grossed out expressions.

5. Naming the cadaver “Juicy Lucy” on account of the fact that every cut made on her body leaked out more formalin mixture which used to sting the eyes.

6. Not even daring to think about female genitalia within any sexual context (imagine!) for weeks after butchering away in its vicinity during lower limb dissection and staring at a dead woman’s pubes for days together.

7. The hair-pullingly hard exam at the end of the module. 100 true/false statements with stuff like “Does the proximal branch of this and this nerve runs medially to this and this artery below the middle arm of so and so muscle?”

In the next post: The second year.

Still alive

15 days too late, but not shamefully late to put my one and only resolution to practice. To keep this blog I so cherished writing all my last year on, alive. That’s it. No more putting my blogging off. And no more procrastinating. I am back with a vengeance and I promise to flood with crap from TV and movies which I just so devilishly enjoy. What’s with Bollywood suddenly? So much activity, the going-ons beg to be commented on.

No seriously, I mean Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother UK?!?!? Its like the most outrageously bizarre phenomenon on British TV this side of 2000. I remember how her posing on the red carpet as she stepped out of the Beemer in a sari made the whole of Britain gasp on the night and then the next day when the poses made it to the front page of every British daily. Actually I remember strangely feeling smug-to-be-Indian first morning back to the university when crushed between the peak hour crowd on the Central Line, a Bollywood beauty on Metro’s front page for a second or two gave enough motivation to gear up for the year ahead. Please don’t ask the semantics of this weird association. This is 7.30 AM I am talking about when my brain’s concept of complex emotions like rationality and motivation are really messed up. It felt good to see an Indian’s face pasted everywhere. Period.

The chick’s got me hooked to this stinker of a reality show though and watching the white chavs like Jade Goody and dumbhead-football-wives like Danielle gang up against her does make for some engrossing TV. My sympathies with apni desi leggy beauty, but what was she thinking when she signed on the dotted line? She’s an A-lister through and through back home and probably the only true “celebrity” in there and it really pained me to see her go through all that she has. She just didn’t deserve it.

For all her sashaying down the red carpet in a gorgeous sari and elegant namastes, her stint in the actual house has actually poked a deeper vein of the society than I had ever imagined. The disgusting show of the fellow British catty whiteheads and vile bullies has really brought about the age-old socio-psychological occurence of culture shock, alienation, and the much dreaded R word. Racism. Yes, its all there in its shining glory–the name calling, the swearing, the bullying, the singling out, the catfights… and its not of any subtle, implied variety. Its the crass shmuck that can be heard on every public school’s playgrounds. My utmost sympathies with the otherwise genteel (if at times annoyingly apologetic and I-like-to-please-everyone) Shilpa, whose short and curt comments are really quotes to behold (”This is your claim to fame… so good for you” & “I represent my country, is this what today’s UK is?”) and whose personality plus the way she has dealt with it all (okay she really does only know the tip of the slagging-iceberg meted out to her, but still) I have become a fan of. Go Shilpa, win this CBB… you deserve the booty, the fame and the applause more than anyone in there!
After bullshitting such obvious appearances like going to shrines all year together etc etc and scoffing plus denying galore, the fact that finally the Baby Bachchan has proposed to Aishwarya Rai even as their fourth cinematic Titanic together sinks made me frown a bit. Something as private an affair as engagement nicely timed to a movie release takes away some genuinity. But what the heck, maybe its my subconscious jealousy for the junior Bachchan to tow away one of the world’s most beautiful woman talking. Oh well!

And from one Bollywood beauty to another! Finally, Madhuri Dixit’s back! After years of religious googling (yup, no matter how much it pisses the Google head honchos, I love saying googling rather than “searching on the net”) on her name first thing in the morning, I almost fell off the chair last month when she landed in Mumbai. The ultimate diva is all set to scorch the silver screen very soon, and boy, if I said I am counting the seconds to the movie’s release, even that’d be understating it. My fanship for this ultimate stunner knows no bounds even after 16 years.

Damn I forgot, this post was supposed to be on movie reviews. And here I am, rambling away like a Page 3 freelancer! Oh well, this whole dual personality thing (for all those still clued in, I am still a hardcore medic by the day) is supremely cathartic but very soon I hope to throw in some philosophical nuggets (read whines and moans) from my own field of study. Very soon.

So that’s that. A comeback, full-of-vain post to convey that yes, I am still very much alive and kicking. Keep reading folks!

Anyone with one good reason why I still shouldn’t be mad about her? Man, that smile…..

Nodding the right way

This might sound a little bizarre, a little trivial and a little too boring,
But I have some strange intrinsic issue with basic nodding,

And by nodding I really do mean the basic up-n-down head bobbing,
Something that’s synonymous with saying yes, and agreeing what the other person is mouthing,

To convey silently that I understand and I agree,
Instead of nodding, I shake my head confusing my peers, lecturers, tutors and people sundry.

The big question is why I do it, why do I shake when I am supposed to do the opposite
Saying yes by nodding is one of the first things you learn as a child, isn’t it?

Searching for a sensible answer meant thinking back to when I first started doing it,
But all the racking and recollecting has confirmed its always been a habit.

Its begun to worry me now as to how many people I’ve given the wrong signal, how many people I have unknowingly spite,
The other day, my new tutor said he’s seldom been so discomfited in his plain sight,

Though I am consciously now trying to nod the right way, correcting myself again and again,
The bloody thing is so badly hard-wired into me, getting rid of it is a bit of a pain.

Is this because as a child, subconsciously I was always a rebel, I always liked saying no,
Or maybe this shaking is just an exaggeration of a slight sideways tilt of obedient yessing, how do I know?

Hell, I am giving this too much importance,
Still, it was fun alright writing what could be a single line of real nagging concern into a quick verse.  

My complete profile

A few weeks back, I was requested by a humble mortal to complete the questionnaire with the most humorous answers possible. The keyword was humour and that had me stuck. Since I suck in the way that I can barely pen anything funny, I kept on putting it off for weeks until today when I just felt like doing it in a spontaneous matter-of-factly sort of a way.

Typical!

*Self-indulgent post warning* The whole idea behind this post is to ramble about a rather “typical” trip to a sea-side that I had the fortune to go to with a busload of retired & middle-aged people (mostly women) of my own kind aka South East Asians. Here are some tidbits. All very typical.