Autopsy!
"It's not like CSI, you know."

The three of us were asking the secretary of the Pathology Department why we couldn't participate in the autopsy we were scheduled to, beginning of the year. Apparently it was a homicide - participating in the autopsy would mean that we would have to get involved with the police!

Yesterday, almost seven months later, the three of us med students finally got the chance, though. And it wasn't the most pleasant experience.

Walking into the autopsy room, for a split-second before my mind gave myself a hard slap - I thought the cadaver was some CPR mannequin. But then her mouth was uncomfortably wide open - with blood and coffee-brown spills all around the mouth, tracing down to her neck - as though she was gasping for life... Which she most probably did before she passed away.

The rock band playing on the portable radio was shouting and screaming, for then-apparently no good reason. "...Urgh, shut up!!" I wanted to yell. I was relieved by the DJ's decision to play some country music after that.

Thankfully it was bright. Thankfully there were windows where I can glance out (but not vice versa) and see trees, and remind myself that I am alive. One registrar worked on the body, while another on the head.

This scene stuck in me - when the registrar flexed the cadaver's head up to make a cut around the back of the head, the cadaver's semi-closed eyes were pointing straight at me. I could see the semi-shrunken eyeballs behind the eyelids giving me the most disconcerting "gaze" - lifeless and cold. The registrar pushed the scalp from the back all the way to the front to reveal the skull - slowly wrinkling and deforming the face, melting it away and trasforming it into some grotesque.

(Truly, our brain places so much emphasis on the eyes and face - how the eyes are the "window to the soul" and the face is able to convey the most heart-melting smile to the most heart-breaking cry - which is why anything that "plays around" with those processing capabilities becomes very disconcerting!)

The other registrar bluntly dissected the viscera from the posterior serous membranes (the posterior pleura, pericardium, mesentery...), and threw us off-guard by holding up all of the internal organs, all of which are still inter-connected - with the lungs still joined to the diaphragm and stomach and colon... - and putting them in a basin. What was left on the autopsy table was an empty "shell" - a face without a brain, a ribcage without lungs, and an abdomen without the bowel.

So we sent a sample of a pulmonary thrombus to confirm that it was post-mortem clot and not pulmonary embolus. A sample of the lower rectum for histology to confirm a variant of Hirschbung's disease. A sample of the choroid plexus. A sample of the spleen.

"Whoa, a talking face!!" was my first impression when I walked out of the autopsy room and met the coordinator of the mortuary.

The idea of a brain, a pair of eyes, some muscles and some connective tissue working together to think, talk, and interact... Honestly I still am uncomfortable with the discordance, and uncomfortable trying to make sense out of it.

But thankfully I recovered soon enough and was able to appreciate the beauty of us people again...