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No Different from the Frog

Christine Benton Criswell

    In front of me were two heavy, ancient-looking, wooden doors, and beyond them—the thing I dreaded most about becoming a doctor. My heart was pounding so hard I could hardly hear the voices around me. I’d wished desperately that I could skip over this part of medical training, just jump right through time, but of course, that was impossible. It was mandatory, a rite of passage, and since becoming a doctor was my dream, I was going to have to face it.
    It was my cadaver, and we were about to be introduced.
    I shuffled into the anatomy lab with my peers, where we were immediately struck by the stench of formaldehyde. It was reminiscent of high school and college biology labs, but far worse. It was an unearthly, toxic, smothering smell, and I did my best to breathe in as little as possible. I looked around. The room was vast, cold, and sterile-looking, without color or anything else remotely cheerful. There were just rows and rows of large, elevated, rectangular, metal tanks, and it didn’t take much guesswork to figure out what was inside them. I felt my skin crawl.
    “Yoo-hoo!” I jumped as a shrill voice from the front of the room broke the silence. I turned and saw a short, white-haired woman standing there, wearing a long, white lab coat and cat-eye glasses.
    “Students! Welcome to Gross Anatomy Lab! My name is Dr. Sterling, and I, along with our phenomenal TAs, will be supervising your dissections. You’ve been divided into groups of four—check the back wall for your tank assignments. You will be doing ALL of your dissections with your group—she paused and, looking around the room in a dramatic way—so you better hope everybody gets along.”
    She narrowed her eyes and cackled.
    We said nothing.
    Her face turned serious, and she gave us instructions for the day. She concluded by throwing back her shoulders, putting her hands on her hips, and crying, “On your mark, get set, GO!”
    I got my group assignment and tentatively approached the tank. My tank mates, Eleanor, Marc, and Ben, were already there. Eleanor and I hit it off immediately. She laughed exactly the way my childhood best friend did, and, in no time, we were commiserating about our equally nonexistent dating lives. Marc was an M.D./Ph.D.—in other words: brilliant. And Ben—he was the most unconventional among us, with his backward baseball cap and diamond earring.
    Eventually, a TA came up to our station and opened the tank’s two lids. Putrid fumes of formaldehyde rose up, solid and brash, and I instinctively staggered back, nearly losing my balance. My head swimming, I watched as the TA began turning a big crank, causing the formaldehyde to ripple and lap up against the sides of the tank. Then, as though rising from a grave, the cadaver emerged. With each turn of the crank, it rose higher and higher, and as it did, my heart rate increased. Finally, it was level with the edge of the tank, and I forced myself to look at its face. It was a frail, elderly woman with haunting eyes and striking, unnaturally pale skin. She was about the age of my grandmother, I guessed, but I quickly pushed the thought aside. This is a scientific specimen, I told myself, no different from the worm or the starfish or the frog I dissected years before. I believed this until I glanced down at the feet. Her toenails were painted—with messy, bright red polish—and, in an instant, I saw a woman who’d wanted to look nice, who took pride in her appearance, but who, in her old age, had difficulty bending over to reach her toes. Standing there looking down at this dead person, imagining her alive but at the same time knowing that I would soon be cutting into her, probing her, pulling her tissues apart—it was profoundly strange, but at the same time awe-inspiring. The memory is etched in my mind.
    Something else I’ll never forget: while gazing at the woman’s feet, I caught sight of a toe tag, and there, in neat script, was her first name. My eyes flew open when I read it—it was the same as my mother’s.

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    I made the first incision. I’m not sure why they chose me—after all, Eleanor already knew she wanted to be a surgeon, and I had virtually no experience with blades of any sort. But they chose me anyway, so I took a deep breath and picked up the scalpel.
    Leaning over the cadaver, I placed the blade over the sternum, pressed down gently, and slowly drew my hand down the length of the chest. The skin was like soft leather, but it hardly yielded under my featherweight, shaking hand. Shuddering, I placed my gloved left hand on the cold flesh of the shoulder, then pushed down on it for leverage as I went over my incision with strength this time, deepening the cut until the yellow, solidified fat layer appeared. My stomach lurched.
    Eleanor, Marc, and Ben followed, tracing over my incision and then lengthening it, their hands moving with as much painstaking care as an archeologist uncovering an ancient artifact. We marveled at how there was no bleeding and how pale and firm the tissues were. Our goal that day was the chest wall muscle, and after a couple of hours of work, we finally reached it. It was pink, not the expected red, and was enveloped by a shimmering, translucent membrane called fascia. Upon close inspection, we could see the individual muscle fibers.
    We were carefully dissecting out an artery when Dr. Sterling approached our tank. At first, she just stood there, saying nothing. She then began walking around the tank, pausing to peer over each of our shoulders. When she came to me, my body stiffened, and I felt beads of sweat roll down my back.
    Suddenly, she shrieked, so loudly that I jumped and nearly sliced Eleanor’s finger. “People! What have you all been doing?! Playing dominoes? You should have reflected the pec major by now! At the pace you’re going, it will be a month before you get to pec minor and serratus anterior! Not to mention cutting the ribs!”
    She closed her eyes and sighed loudly. A minute passed, maybe two, before she pushed her way between Eleanor and Ben, grunting, “OK. Step aside.”
    She bent down so far her face was nearly touching the cadaver, thrust her gloved fingers into the body, and with her face pointed at the ceiling, began violently shaking her hand. With each jarring motion, the cadaver jerked left and right, and the formaldehyde sloshed around, coming dangerously close to spilling over the edge of the tank. I jumped back to avoid getting splashed, but with one powerful thrust of her hand, Dr. Sterling sent the liquid flying through the air, and to my horror, droplets of the foul stuff landed on my forearm. My tank mates later told me I turned as white as a ghost.

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    Over the next few months, we spent countless hours probing, cutting, and dissecting our cadaver, becoming intimately acquainted with each of her organs, muscles, and arteries. I learned more than I thought possible in that time, and, slowly and thankfully, my fear of the cadaver began to fade.
    One day around Christmas—halfway through the class—Eleanor suggested that we sing Christmas carols while we worked. Ben and Marc rolled their eyes at the idea, but I agreed, eager for some festivity. Quietly, we began “Silent Night,” followed by “Away in a Manger,” and then “O Holy Night.” Our confidence grew as we sang, and as it did, we got louder.
    Others began to notice. Brooke from the next tank over complimented us on our idea, then turned back to her tank mates, and, soon, they were singing, too. Carol, Rebecca, Owen, and Austin from the tank on the other side of us joined in next. Stephen heard our rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” as he was walking by, and shortly afterward, we heard voices caroling from the back of the room. The spirit of merriment continued to spread. Before long, all of us—even Marc and Ben—were singing at the top of our lungs.
    As we belted out “Joy to the World,” I looked around at my peers and smiled. We were a family, bonded by our calling, sealed by our scalpels, christened by formaldehyde. The once cold room now seemed warm, and I noticed for the first time how brilliantly the overhead lights made the metal tanks shine. Our cadaver’s eyes shone along with them, her gaze serene, noble, and generous. I watched those eyes for some time, and then, with a steady arm, reached out, took her hand in mine, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

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