The Doctor Seuss School of Medicine

Well. I MADE IT! It is almost Labor Day and I've already been in school for almost three weeks with my first set of tests behind me and the next set coming up soon. It has been a whirlwind, but I am loving the chance to get so invested in a profession that I truly believe in and that will likely be something that I do for a long, long, long, long time to come.

I thought that it might be fun to share one of my first assignments with you. This is an essay that I wrote about my experience with my first patient...my cadaver in anatomy lab.



Cadaver Story

To say that there was a presence in the room is an understatement. The combined energies and spirits of fifty people, alive and passed, students and donors, was overwhelming. I was nervous and anxious about my first interaction with the body of one deceased person, but as soon as I walked into a room with over 20 body bags that nervousness turned into a feeling of lightheadedness and nausea.

In light of the challenge ahead of me, I resorted to the methods I use in any daunting or nerve-racking situation. I divided the experience into steps of manageable size. Today, those steps were crumb-sized. Find my safety glasses. Write my name on my apron. Put on my gloves. Unzip the body bag. Find the drainage hole in the bag. Clean the right knee of the donor. Wipe off the remnants of the embalming process on the upper left arm. Drain the bag. Hold the scalpel. Tighten my grip on the hemostat. Cut between the white and the red tissue. Mop up the fluid…the list goes on.

I turned my first patient encounter into a series of interactions to achieve an end goal. This isn’t any new wisdom. My experience with medicine thus far has been consistent with this technique. However, it was unique with this patient because the steps were not interactive. Usually, I would have a checklist of things to accomplish (check airway, check breathing, check pulse...) and the patient will give me feedback with each check. Through this discourse a relationship is built, even if it is purely based off of vital signs there is a dynamic component from both sides of the interaction. Now, I was learning to build a new type of relationship based off of static anatomy because even though my donor was very compliant in letting me complete the tasks at hand, his dynamic part of our interaction happened weeks, months, or years earlier when he made the decision to donate his body and I wasn’t a part of it.

I found this disconnect unnerving. The relationship was too one-sided. Throughout the session, if at any point I lost focus of the task at hand, the details of the larger picture would swell up inside my head and bring back the lightheadedness and the queasiness. While in the room with the donor, it was too difficult to process the context of cutting into and mutilating a body (in a very organized way) for my own education and betterment.

As the class was wrapping up, I was barely able to hold onto my steady grasp of completing the small tasks without my mind slipping back toward the larger context. I made it out after washing the tools, zipping the bag, washing my hands…then I HEADED UP INTO THE FRESH AIR and I felt much BETTER.

In the two weeks following this first experience, I have begun to understand and accept the ongoing relationship that I will have with the donor in a healthier, more dynamic way. I now view this patient experience as two parts. The first happens in the lab where the focus is on tissues, bones, organs, vessels and my learning goals. The second, and more important, can only happen outside of the lab where I am able to reflect on this patient’s contribution to my education and to understand the choice that he made in donating his body. For me, engaging in these two separate processes has now made the relationship and experience more whole.




- Cait