Meet Emelia: My Cadaver and My First Patient

Today was the first day of dissecting. My group named our cadaver Emelia. There isn't really reasoning behind the name, it just seemed to fit.

Nothing really can prepare you for that first day of dissection. You walk into a room full of cadavers with classmates who know just as little as you do and are expected to act as though you are not cutting human flesh. There is some degree of dissociation necessary to be able to complete the tasks we are asked to do. Conversely, you can't dissociate entirely because you have to learn everything in the context of a living human body and you also can't dissociate because you have to treat the cadaver with a lot of respect, just as you would a living human. Before we ever see the cadavers, their heads and eyebrows are shaved to dehumanize them to some extent to make it a little easier for us to handle initially.

Today we removed all of the skin from the back, back of the neck and the back of her arms to expose the muscles. We also had to remove the layer of fat between the skin and the muscles. Emelia probably enjoyed good cooking and relaxing because she is much larger than most of the other cadavers - which makes dissection difficult, but my group readily embraced the challenge.

I found that I handled the dissection well as long as I was actively doing something. The moments when I was standing by and others in my group were taking a turn, it was much harder to not react. Having a task to distract me from the idea of what I was doing was extremely helpful. A few times I did get a little light-headed (probably partially from the overwhelming smell), but a short break to sit or take a walk down the hall helped. I'm sure, like most things in life, dissection will get easier as the exposure increases. Despite more time in the lab increasing comfort level, I've heard from many med students that the hardest dissections to handle are the face and hands - since those areas are what we generally associate with "being human".

I hope to learn a lot from Emelia. I hope to learn a lot from all of my patients, but I think my first, Emilia, will teach me the most.

I won't be in the lab dissecting every day. There are eight of us assigned to the table, but divided into two teams of four. We rotate which day we are dissecting so I don't dissect again until Thursday.