for cadaver #13
Last week I cut the head off my cadaver. Not in one fell swoop, guillotine-style, but rather, I dissected her calvarium: fancy language for cutting through the top half of her skull—from right above her eyebrows in front, to the “occipital protuberance” (that bony bump at the base of your head) in back—with a bone saw.
My lab partners and I had started with a scalpel, carefully slicing a line through her flesh all the way around her head. “Bone saws are for bone, not skin,” our instructor had said, and so we diligently cut first. Then one of my partners plugged in the bone saw—a handheld medieval-looking device with a vibrating blade—and around and around our cadaver’s skull we went, rolling her from front to back at least three times to make sure we had sawed all the way through her head. We sweated from the strain of lifting, rolling, and holding her dead weight, and formaldehyde and blood from her body seeped into our lab jackets, our clothes, and our skin.
Everywhere, all around us, other students were doing the same thing: the Anatomy lab buzzed with the sound of saws and teams yelling back and forth trying to coordinate their cadavers’ next move. At moments, everything seemed to move in slow motion, and tiny rivulets of smoke curled up from each table as saws fought against thick bone. Back at our table, fragments of that bone flew up from our cadaver’s forehead and face and into the air. They landed, like ash falling, not just on the table or the floor at my feet, but on my clothes, my hands, my hair, my face, and—when I finally opened my mouth to shout against the sound of the saw—my tongue. Instinctively, I swallowed.
When we were finished sawing, I took out a mallet and a chisel, placed it in the crack the saw had made in my cadaver’s head, and began to pound. More rolling back and forth, more pounding, and then suddenly, with one true smack right above her left eyebrow, the skull came free: it popped off all at once, falling back on the table and exposing this woman’s naked brain cradled in what was left of her skull.
I held the mallet in one hand and the chisel in the other while my lab partners and I stepped back from the table. We looked at each other and then at our cadaver as though we could not quite believe what we had done. No one said a word, but our cadaver’s calvarium rocked back and forth, back and forth, in front of us. Finally, it stopped.
I could not eat lunch that day. The lab had taken longer than expected, and by the time we finished the dissection, sprayed our cadaver with formaldehyde, and cleaned up, the lunch hour was nearly gone. My lab partners and I stumbled into our one o’clock lecture a little late. It had been raining on the walk from the cadaver lab to the lecture hall, and when we got there I was cold and wet. I was also shell-shocked, wobbly; I had not been able to walk a straight line from the parking lot we had to cross to reach our classroom. And even though there was a gnawing in my stomach, I could not imagine what it might mean to eat food. Around me, classmates who had not dissected that day were pulling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of plastic bags or munching on hamburgers and fries from the hospital cafeteria. I closed my eyes, put my head down on my desk, and tried very, very hard to listen to what the instructor was saying.
At home that night, my shock continued. I wrapped myself in a ball on the couch, in my bed. In an effort to manage my discomfort, I set aside studying—a huge risk, given the intense pace of med school coursework—and pulled out my favorite coping mechanisms: cooking comfort food, eating ice cream, and walking the dog. When these did not work, I moved on to reading passages from literature I loved and walked the dog, again. My functioning was rudimentary, checked out, subdued.
I have known depression before—and discouragement and despair—but the darkness I experienced that night was something altogether different: trauma. At some point before I went to bed, and after multiple attempts at comfort had failed, I realized I could do nothing but wait to recover—to mark time and try to hold myself together until my soul had a chance to catch up with the actions my body had taken. While I was waiting, I also wrote, telling this story to my journal: “I cut the head off my cadaver today,” I explained. “And I am convinced that on some level what I did was wrong, unforgivable, even.”
I have always wanted to be a doctor. My father is a physician, and for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be like him, to do as I saw him do. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of watching him operate—literally and figuratively—as he took care of people in my small hometown. On more than one occasion, I watched television in hospital waiting rooms while he delivered babies or made rounds, and always, I felt somehow important: that inasmuch as the work my father was doing was important, I must be, too.
My first introduction to gore came when I was seven or eight years old. There was no full-time emergency coverage in our little town then, and when people were injured or got sick, the best they could do was go to the hospital and ask somebody to call their family doctor. I was with my dad when he answered a call on one of those days, and when we arrived at the emergency room we discovered a boy not much older than me who had somehow been hit in the face with a ball. His parents were distraught, and blood ran out of his mouth, down his chin, and onto his neck. I watched as my father began cleaning this boy up, wiping blood from his bruised face, and comforting him while ascertaining where he needed to be stitched. And then, because it was a Saturday afternoon and the hospital was short-staffed, my father had me wash my hands and put on sterile gloves to help him. I picked up the boy’s upper lip, pulled it back toward his nose—exposing the fleshy, bloody underside—and held it in place while my father put stitches in a wound that extended from the top of the boy’s inner lip on the far right, across his gumline, and into his teeth on the left.
Although I was short and had to stand on a stool to see our patient, as I held this boy’s lip out of my father’s way, I felt important. Grownup. I also felt, for the first time, the kind of subtle dissociation that can come on to make it possible to bear a bloody sight. I had never seen this kind of destruction before—the meaty shards of skin, the bone exposed, the blood surrounding everything, filling up every space it could. I had also never seen the kind of trauma that repair sometimes brings: the stiffening of the boy’s body and the tears that rolled down his cheeks as my father injected the anesthetic; the anguished looks on his parents’ faces as they held him still; or how each stitch made a fresh new hole in the boy’s mouth—a new, smaller wound to heal a larger one—a new crevice for blood to seep out of, and one more puddle for my father to soak up with already very red gauze.
I thought I would faint. Actually, I wasn’t old enough to have ever fainted, so I probably thought I would throw up. But in retrospect, I know I was feeling faint, and remember fearing I would lose my footing on the stool, my grip on the boy’s lip, and my place at that table.
But I wanted to do my job. I wanted to be there for my father and that boy. I wanted the grown-ups in the room to be proud of me, to believe I had done a good thing. And in spite of myself, I was caught up in the wonder of it all—the beauty of the boy’s torn body, the seeming magic of my father’s expertise, the sense of being a part of something larger than myself—and I wanted to hang on. I didn’t want to be the kid who fell apart. So I bent my locked knees and swallowed my nausea, and I remember very consciously telling myself that everything would be okay—that I could somehow simultaneously witness something that was traumatic and not freak out.
I have been that way ever since. I have attended complicated births of friends’ babies, have been the first on the scene of gore-filled accidents, and once even saved a stranger’s life by giving him CPR through a sea of blood and vomit in the middle of a New York City sidewalk. And through it all, I have remained calm. Sometimes I have been a little edgy and anxious after the fact, and had a story I needed to tell, but in the thick of the crisis I have remained steady. At some point in my childhood, I learned the virtue of stomaching immediate discomfort and grotesquerie for the greater good of saving a life or simply healing a wound.
I’ll admit that I went to medical school, in part, because I liked the feeling of being able to dissociate myself enough from a circumstance to be able to function, to be the unflappable one in a crowd. I also had some gut-level belief that people who were able to make that dissociation ought to do it: that perhaps my quirky psychological accommodations could be put to some good.
But I also came to medical school because on a deeper level I have always been fascinated with people. I spent my twenties teaching English—getting a PhD even—not because of some love of grammar or literature for its own sake but because of what great literature and interacting with students reveal about the human condition. I loved hearing my students’ stories and encouraging them to join their narratives to the great narratives of world literature, and I loved what immersion in these stories taught me about life and death and mourning and joy and peace. But at some point the whole exercise seemed too academic and removed from reality to matter very much. I grew tired of reading about death and illness and grief. Instead of communing in a figurative way over the sadness of the human condition, I wanted to place myself in the thick of it: to mourn with those who were mourning, to touch the sick and the weary, and to celebrate with those who were finally free of illness or suffering. I wanted to get dirty. I also had a (probably arrogant) suspicion that my humanities education had somehow prepared me for the trauma of medical school—that the conversations I had been having for years about big life issues would translate into an ability to work in and among those issues with real people. It was a naive assumption.
On the day we cut off my cadaver’s calvarium, we also removed her brain. I stood at the head of the lab table with one hand on either side of her brain, my fingers close together and extended up into the remaining part of her face, prying the front of her brain from all of its attachments behind her nose and eyes. One of my partners stood by with a scalpel, and when necessary, we scraped and cut. After forty minutes we had detached everything and so pulled her brain out of the top of her head. My lab partners and I then read the dissector. It told us to turn the brain over and identify all of the cranial nerves. I held her brain in my hands and we did.
My cadaver is a fifty-one-year-old woman. She died on May 11, 2000. Like all of the other cadavers in our lab, she is a volunteer: she gave her body to the medical school before she died. But I do not know her name or how she died. I also do not know if she lived in Salt Lake City, where I now attend school, or if she came to me from far away. But the things I do know about her are peculiar, mundane, and full of meaning I do not know what to do with. She wears a Band-Aid on her left index finger, for example, and her fingernails and toenails are bright red and were carefully manicured before she died. Her armpits and legs are also shaved. I like to imagine that this means she found pleasure in taking care of herself, or perhaps, if she was sick right before she died, that someone else lovingly cared for her. She also has no ovaries or uterus, and her appendix has been removed. I try to imagine the health problems that necessitated these surgeries and wonder if she ever had children—and if she did, if they mourn for her, now, or know what I am doing to their mother. I also know that our cadaver has beautiful skin, fine muscle tone, and healthy organs. In fact, she has become a favorite cadaver in the lab: because of her youth and good condition, other students come to our table to examine her and learn.
I also know other facts: that her abdominal aorta—the vessel that carries oxygenated blood from the heart to the gut and all of the organs in the central body cavity—is hard and calcified, and that her lungs and liver are enlarged and heavy. She has broken ribs, and bruises on her chest and its underlying tissues—probably from having received CPR. She ate food right before she died: we found it partially digested when we cut open her stomach.
All of these details speak of her life—and possibly her death—and they seem almost too much to bear. Like a one-night stand that leaves me knowing details about my lover’s anatomy, but not his name, I sometimes feel my own humanity—and that of my cadaver—to be lost in the details. The absence of her uterus and the broken ribs speak to a life and death that I am immensely curious about and yet daily am asked to desecrate. It does not seem fair to know a body so well without knowing the life that shaped it. I feel caught in a kind of intimacy that is about knowledge without meaning—about bits and pieces without a whole. I long to tell this woman that to me, she is more than the sum of her parts. But after what I have done to her, I am not sure she would listen.
Struggling with this conflict between the pieces and the whole, on the night after we removed my cadaver’s calvarium and brain, I also wrote: “And I am convinced that on some level what we did was wrong…or at least that how we did it was wrong: hurried, rushed, hacking away at her innocent body to meet the demands of an instructor. A class. Nowhere was this woman’s humanity mentioned. Nowhere did the instructor pause to consider what she—or any of the other 25 cadavers in the classroom—had done with their brains. Her personhood, and the use she made of that organ in her life, was never mentioned.”
There are names for what we do with our cadaver. I do not like any of them. Mutilation. Molestation. Necrophilia. Cannibalism. Being a medical school student.
There is no argument that we have carved up, carved away, and mutilated my cadaver’s body. The scalpel is a tool of discovery whose mark is irreparable. Ten weeks into the job, my cadaver looks nothing like she did when she was alive—or when we first received her. As I write, she sits in six pieces: she is cut in half through her trunk and also lengthwise, her bottom is separated from her top, each limb from the other, and her head has been cleaved in two. Some of this we accomplished with a band saw. The skin that was left has been filleted back, revealing muscle, guts, and bone. Organs are missing—carried off for other people to examine. And although none of my lab partners has purposefully molested our cadaver in the way we usually think of the word, we have followed instructions and placed probes in her vagina, her anus, and her urethra. Sometimes simultaneously. We have sliced through her nipples, cracked open her breasts, and removed all the tissue from her clitoris, leaving it exposed and bare.
Although words like “necrophila” and “cannibalism” seem severe, it is true that I have spent more time in closer proximity to the private parts of my cadaver’s body than I ever have with living bodies—except with a lover. I have stretched my body across the length of hers in order to get into the right position to view or dissect different structures. Depending on the day, I have had my face next to her face or genitalia for hours on end, and worn her smell and bodily fluids home in my hair and on my clothes. There is also no denying that I have inhaled and ingested parts of her body: smoke and shards from her bone have burned my nose and throat. And at times, her formaldehyde-soaked body fluids have splashed against my face, and into my eyes and mouth.
I have done all of this in the name of learning and discovery—and with the permission granted to me by my status as a medical school student. But it is a difficult business to perform tasks that in any other context would be considered wrong. Even evil, taboo.
The Anatomy lab after the calvarium and brain dissection was in some ways worse than the actual sawing and cutting. We were to identify all the nerves and holes and cavities (“foramen” and “fossa”) of the skull that had been revealed by our dissection. We did this, and at the time I felt very smart, applying names to structures I had not even known existed three days before. But perhaps it was this very naming that was so troubling to me, because although my partners and I hugged each other when we were done, grateful we did not have to come back to the lab for a few days, I left upset.
That afternoon, I visited a group therapy session for adolescent girls in drug and alcohol rehabilitation. As part of medical education, our dean’s office has placed students with community agencies to observe and do service. All fall, I have gone every other week to meet with this group. This time, the group leader had asked me to do a presentation on women’s health. Some of the girls had had problems with sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies. As a representative of the medical community, could I put together a presentation? Something informative and empowering and upbeat?
I could, and did, even full of pictures, diagrams on the board, and anatomically correct language. But partway through the presentation, I noticed a troubled look on one girl’s face. She had crossed her legs, wound her arms tightly around herself, and bent over a little: folding up as tightly as she could while still remaining seated. She refused to look at pictures—of her own, female genitalia even—which I had hoped would be helpful and empowering. It occurred to me, suddenly, that she had probably been abused, and that things I was speaking about figuratively, or offering as images, were all too real to her. If so, I was simultaneously recalling the reality of her experience and dismissing it by reducing it to images and words. “What can you teach us about all of this that is true?” I wanted to ask her, knowing my objectification of her experience of being female had not even come close to the mark. But instead, I just toned down my presentation a half a notch, asked her if she was okay, and then tried to remain sensitive to her for the rest of the discussion.
At home that night I wept. I wadded myself into as tight a ball as I could, stayed on the couch, and did not move. I could not bear that I had perpetuated on someone else the same objectification of bodily realities that was being daily foisted on me. I wanted to tell that young woman that she was more than the sum of her parts. Then I wondered whether, if those parts could tell stories, she could be made whole.
I am not the only person who is experiencing the first part of medical school as trauma. All around me, people are falling apart: a handful even refuse to go to the cadaver lab anymore. They want no part of the daily plundering we are doing there. Others fall apart visually or vocally in lab. One student left the calvarium dissection in tears; another screamed and ran out of the room. Many of us refuse to eat meat. Some of the coping mechanisms I see people using scare me. Too many of my classmates have just plain checked out—done the same kind of separation of self-from-reality, action-from-emotion, that I learned as a child, only carried to a much higher degree. They walk around with hooded faces, speaking in anatomically correct language with voices devoid of emotion or even presence. Others have just plain become mean: they lash out at each other, at the dean’s office, our instructors, the class officers. Some do not even come to class. That it is trauma we are experiencing is no question. The only question is how we manage it.
And I have gotten all kinds of suggestions about how to deal with the trauma, from people inside the medical profession and out. “Can’t you just distance yourself?” both kindly friends and practicing physicians have asked. And “Isn’t that kind of distancing necessary, anyway, if you want to be a doctor?” They have advised that I cannot possibly feel this deeply about every body I interact with and stay sane—that some diminution of emotion is essential for success. Others have also suggested that I simply focus on the task at hand and stop worrying about existential issues, or advised that I need to learn to “compartmentalize”—to work on my cadaver with one part of myself while leaving other parts free for emotion and different tasks.
While I hear good intentions and even bits of wisdom in these comments, what these friends and colleagues do not understand is that none of these are coping mechanisms I want to wholly acquire. Although I experienced a kind of pleasure-of-dissociation as a child, the amount of dissociation required to make what I am doing in the cadaver lab tolerable would require a loss of self on some level: a shutting down of the “feeling” part of myself that is the very reason I came to medical school in the first place. And “focus”? On what? The remains of the woman that lie in front of me or the realities that brought her—and me—to this place?
Thinking about this in the cadaver lab, I am reminded of controversial legal work carried out in the 1980s and 1990s by a feminist attorney, Catharine MacKinnon. In Pornography and Civil Rights, as well as other texts, MacKinnon argues against pornography by trying to establish a connection between pornography and violence. Specifically—and with pertinence to my experience in the cadaver lab—her definition of pornography includes depiction of subjects’ “body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, or buttocks—exhibited such that [the subjects] are reduced to those parts” (italics mine). By extension, because pornography presents the body in bits and pieces, it can lead to a dehumanization of not just the person being viewed but the person doing the viewing. Seeing fragmented images makes us forget the whole. The end result of this, MacKinnon postulates, may even be violence.
Although anatomy labs are a long ways away from legal proceedings regarding pornography, and MacKinnon’s theory remains controversial, her suggestion that there may be consequences to viewing the body in bits and pieces haunts me in the cadaver lab. Although I personally cannot vouch for a connection between pornography and violence, I find myself beginning to believe in the dehumanization aspect of what she describes. Even worse, if images of parts cut off from the whole can cause a kind of desensitization to human experience, where does that leave me? What does that say about a lonely medical student doing the cutting?
As part of each anatomy exam, we have a lab practical: two items on each cadaver are tagged. We walk by each cadaver and have one minute to name the item before moving on to the next. The last exam included male and female reproductive organs. There was one man, excuse me, cadaver, in the class who had a very large penis and immensely swollen testicles because of an illness he suffered right before he died. “This guy’s got gonads the size of Texas,” one of the instructors called out on the day we did the genitalia dissection. And indeed, they were large. When we did a cross section of the penis—scientific jargon for chopping it off at the shaft—the internal structures were large and easy to see. For this reason, many students felt sure it would be tagged for the exam. It was. But as I approached this man’s table on the day of the exam, MacKinnon’s words commingled in my head with all the anatomical terms I had memorized for the test: the instructors had removed the man’s penis from his body, re wrapped the rest of the body completely in its white shroud, and then perched the penis, alone, on top of the white lump that was the man’s covered body. We had not only dismembered this man but also hung him out to dry. A most essential part of his anatomy had been wholly objectified and separated from the body that sustained it throughout his life.
I know a physician whom I quite like as a person, though he is a terrible doctor. He is abrupt and dismissive with patients, yells at nurses and at the hospital staff. And most of this seems to be brought on by a terrible insecurity—an impatience with his own weaknesses that he takes out daily on those around him. I have always figured that this was just his personality, and blamed his parents, a bully in his elementary school, or another trauma from his childhood. Now, I have a different way of seeing him: I cannot help but wonder if at one time he was a kind student, whose good intentions went to hell when he could find no place to keep, or way to hang on to, the humanity he brought with him to medical school.
Recently, someone explained to me that medical schools were based on a military model. And I mean this not just in terms of the brutality or intense pace (the first year of medical school has sometimes been compared to boot camp), but also that medical schools grew out of military needs: war and field hospitals have often been training grounds for physicians and surgeons. Ironically, much of what we know about saving life today has been born of death and conflict. A good example of this is the Hare traction splint, a device used to immobilize the leg when the femur—the large bone in the thigh—is broken. The splint was perfected in World War I and consists of braces, straps, and weights that straighten out the spasming massive thigh muscles and prohibit excessive movement of the broken bones. Before it was invented, soldiers with fractured femurs usually bled to death before reaching the field hospital: jostling and bumping around in the ambulance on the journey from the front line caused broken ends of bone to jab repeatedly into the surrounding muscle and soft tissue and resulted in massive bleeding.
But the unending trauma of military conflict also necessitated a physician who could take it on: absorbing crisis after crisis, treating each patient with unflappable expertise and calm before moving on to the next—and then the next. There was no time for falling apart on the job or attending to one’s own emotions when other lives were at stake.
So medical schools were designed to produce this kind of operator: someone who could be counted on to calmly save lives and limbs. If, after the crisis ended, physicians could also exhibit compassion or kindness to their patients, all the better, but the first goal was a very real—and necessary—kind of clinical expertise.
Physicians and educators of this school of thought would no doubt argue that my trauma in the cadaver lab is a necessary part of my education—part of steeling myself to the job I must ultimately do. They are probably right. I suspect, as well, that they might see my emotion as a luxury a good doctor cannot afford—at least not in the middle of a crisis—and maybe even as a detriment to good practice. Perhaps they would simply tell me to quit my bellyaching. But my argument here is not with their end goal—or the necessity of producing physicians capable of handling multiple traumas. We need people in this world trained to perform such tasks. If the childhood pleasure I experienced helping my father is any indicator, I would even like to be one of those people. My only question is if I am required to put my humanity on hold to accomplish that goal, or if there are ways to get there that let me keep my own body and soul intact.
On the day I cut the head off my cadaver, my great-aunt, Pauline Jenson, died. A fun, energetic woman who had helped her husband run a farm and raised five children, she had finally succumbed to cancer after a four-year battle. I loved my great-aunt and grieved for her loss; but I grieved even more for her children, and for my grandmother, who, in losing her sister, had also lost her best friend.
A few days later, attending Pauline’s funeral became a way to attend to my own psychological trauma. I knew I needed to see Pauline’s dead body—to see a body whole and undefiled and to remember that death need not always be about dismemberment. I was also scared to see her. But as I approached her body in the open casket at the mortuary before the funeral began, I was struck by how beautiful she appeared, how at peace she seemed. And I had to touch her: I put my hands on her hands and ran my fingers across her cheek. “Yes, that seems about right,” I thought to myself when I felt her cold, firm skin, “that’s what a dead body feels like,” and then was troubled by my own new knowledge: death had never been familiar enough before to be used as a benchmark. Prior to working with cadavers, “dead” was simply the thing you were when you were no longer alive.
Letting this all sink in, I walked outside to take a big breath and be alone for a minute. My father followed. “Too goddamn many dead bodies in my life right now,” I told my dad when he caught up with me.
“I know,” he said, and handed me his handkerchief. Then, later that day, after the funeral and the graveside service, we spoke again. My father asked me what bothered me so much about working with cadavers.
“It’s destruction without redemption,” I told him. “In some ways, it would be easier to do these things to a living person—if it could somehow save or help them. But this, there is no meaning to this destruction.”
My dad was quiet. “The redemption won’t come for a long time,” he said when he finally spoke. “But eventually, it will add up in the lives this woman’s sacrifice allows you to save.”
On the day we removed my cadaver’s brain, there was a time when I held her upright, sitting, while my lab partners worked on pulling her brain out the back of her skull. It was a strange image, and a strange experience, really: we had not bisected her down the middle yet, so I had my arms around her shoulders and my face next to hers, as if she were ill, and I were helping her sit up in bed to take a drink or adjust her pillows.
It was the day before Halloween. People walked by and made macabre jokes. “It’s like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” someone said, recalling the moment in the film when Harrison Ford’s character eats monkey brains. “We ought to take a picture,” other people said. “It’s quite a sight, really, especially at this time of year.”
But as I held that woman, I grieved for her, and for those twenty or so minutes while my lab partners finished digging her brain out of her head, she was all too real to me. Although I knew she was dead, I somehow imagined that she was there, and that in holding, supporting her in that all-too-human way, I was helping her participate in some strange, maybe even sacred, last rite. I heard lines from Dylan Thomas’s poem about resisting and fighting death, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” in my head. And I wondered if donating her body, my cadaver, to the medical school had been this woman’s way of raging “against the dying of the light.” In allowing us to hack her to bits, she was striking one last blow at death—living on in what I had eaten and breathed of her, but also in my lab partners’ and my memories of her as well.
This idea, and my father’s words about some future redemption, are the only things that bring me any peace. I hold on to them, and try to hear my dad’s voice in my head every time I pull on rubber gloves, put on my stained lab jacket, and walk into the Anatomy lab. I run them through my mind as I cradle my cadaver’s brain in my hands or wheel her naked body to the band saw for the severing of her next part, and the new cross section of tissues it will reveal.
And although I know she is dead, sometimes I stop in the middle of all this dissection just to touch my cadaver—not as a future physician or someone who holds a scalpel in her other hand, but simply as one human being to another: to hold, to steady, and to comfort. I squeeze her fingers or rest my hand against what remains of her shoulder, her wrist, her forehead. And for some reason, at the end of every dissection, I reassemble her. Like putting back together some giant, human jigsaw puzzle of my own making, I always realign her parts, placing right limbs back on the right side of her body, and left on left, before making sure all her organs are in their appropriate cavities. Finally, before I cover her body in its shroud, I balance her brain in the remaining wedges of her skull and place the bisected sides of her face together again so they meet where they should, at her nose.
In these moments, as the Anatomy lab grows quiet and my work for the day is done, I try to believe that what this woman and I are doing is greater than the both of us: that someday there will be redemption for her desecrated body and for my own tortured acts of desecration.