4

It Is Way More Disgusting Than You Could Ever Guess

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3

Morgues Look Nothing Like You Think

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In movies and TV, morgues are dimly lit basements shot in cold blue light with maybe a screeching violin or two for atmosphere. For example, there's, uh, The Morgue ...

Lionsgate
"It takes place in ... the morgue."
"Greenlit!"

But in real life morgues are places of work, and they look like it. They're well lit, since it's impossible to do a proper dissection with Matrix rave-lighting, and there are literally walls of sinks, because you're going to be washing yourself and your tools almost constantly.

They're not isolated, either: My current lab is around the corner from the gym, and another morgue I worked at was down the hall from a kitchen and a hop, skip, and a jump from a food court.

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The smells from the Arby's were disgusting, but we got used to it.

That's not to say it isn't horrifying; it's just that the horror is more mundane. Like, there was a cabinet full of stacks of human organs organized into orange buckets and Tupperware. I'd glance up and see "lungs, 2011" written on some tape -- there were literally lungs older than my smartphone just sitting on that shelf. And there was our jigsaw, which was perpetually covered with fragments of human bone and assorted tissue. In our anatomy lab, there were a bunch of "specimens" (pieces of guy) just sitting on an AV cart. Why an AV cart? Well, apparently the AV department had rolled it in for a presentation and forgot it there, so med students started stacking stuff (i.e. 65 percent of a dude) on it. For some reason, the AV people didn't really want it back.

2

Your Body Is A Wonderland (And That Sucks)

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Everyone is unique and different. Sure, that's magical or whatever, but it's also a pain in the ass when you're trying to learn how to be a doctor. If you're particularly biologically quirky -- you're the anatomical Zooey Deschanel -- you can seriously stall out my education. Because we only get one cadaver, and that thing has to last us a whole semester. We learn about bodies from those bodies, so if your lung is a mottled bag of stygian pus, I just have to hope I can make friends with someone who's got a good one that I can learn from.

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We want you to die healthy.

Breast implants? Fuck 'em. Valve replacements? To hell with 'em.

We all pitied students with a fat cadaver: Every organ was caked with inches of the stuff that needed to be painstakingly scraped away, making every dissection twice as long and 10 times as disgusting.

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But it was still nice of your mom, donating her body to science.

One of the worst stories I've heard is a bunch of students struggling over penis dissection all day only to discover the source of their confusion: The guy had a penis pump installed that no one had known about.

1

Dead Bodies Are All Sorts Of Fun, And All Sorts Of Dangerous

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Most muscles are layered, and it's not immediately obvious what connects to what. So the best way to find out is just to pull on a tendon and see what moves -- it quickly becomes commonplace to beckon your lab partner by plucking the strings that manipulate a dead person's index finger.

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"Real funny, Jean. Hey, check out what this tendon does."

A friend, Abby Normal, once mentioned how much she enjoyed digging around in the nerves behind the eyes.

"When I was at the back of the skull, there's a lot of fat around the eye and I would occasionally pull a muscle by accident," she said. "After one time I did it, my classmate put down her scalpel and was like, 'I'm done; it looked at me.'"

The cadavers will even make noises:

"One time, the professor and a group of students were examining a body and they put pressure on it in such a way that all of the gas in the body went straight up through the chest and past the vocal cords, and he said, 'OoooOOOOH.'"

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"And that's why we have the class rifle now ... just in case."

But it's not all fun and games.

Once, one of our students got confused about his cadaver and his own arm, and he merrily sliced into his own skin. Bits of blood, bone and flesh have flopped into virtually every student's mouth at some point. If you get cavalier when digging in the cadaver with a scalpel and it breaks off somewhere in the recesses of a hip flexor, you've basically laid a landmine for your partner or future self -- one hidden deep inside rotting human flesh. Neosporin isn't going to cut it on that wound.

Beth Ohara
Tip: Scalpel mines are a great way to ensure future cadavers.

Operating a bone saw is pretty cool, but it leaves incredibly sharp edges. That means a run-in with a sawed-off bone can leave more than one mangled body in the vicinity. Abby very nearly split herself open on the end of a sheared clavicle.

Hey -- at least she could have pointed to the scar and told people that the guy who did that to her is now dead. Technically, that would've been perfectly accurate.

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Horrific Things You Learn Preserving Brains for a Living and 5 Awful Realities of Transporting Human Corpses for a Job.

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