5

Doctors Call Dibs On Body Parts

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If a surgeon removes something weird from your body, it goes to the pathology lab for storage. It will stay there for about six weeks in case the doctor was wrong and it was a totally normal thing that really needs to go back inside you, ASAP. According to Lisa, "This results in the walls of our lab being lined with metal shelves holding hundreds of specimens floating in jars" -- like some kind of artisan pickle store.

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"Would you care for some organic, free-range, dill pancreas?"

After six weeks, the specimens get incinerated as medical waste, unless a doctor simply decides to keep one because of how cool it looks. Lisa says, "Doctors would leave notes on particularly interesting specimens like 'Save this one for me!' and then it would be kept in the lab indefinitely. ... Whole organs from autopsies would be kept by the pathologists for teaching, ostensibly, but I have to assume that some of the docs just liked the creepy 'Victorian-era medical oddity freak show' aspect of keeping organs around."

4

The Lab Constantly Smells Of Shit

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"If I came into work in the morning and smelled poop, I knew it was going to be a bad day," Lisa told us, which first made us laugh, but then she continued with the story and the laughter died.

"People with cancer or other blockages sometimes have the blood supply to parts of their bowel cut off, which makes the bowel die while it's still inside them. So the surgeons take it out and reconnect the good bits. ... That dead bowel goes to pathology, so you have necrotic tissue that's starting to rot, plus fecal matter that's pretty old, plus the smell of flesh and blood, plus the formalin used to preserve everything, and you have this awful cocktail of smells that never seems to get out of your nose."

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You can't even see a poop emoji without getting flashbacks.

3

Your Flesh Becomes An Arts & Crafts Project

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Cancer is a real son of a bitch, with the power to kill even God, so whenever a hospital removes a tumor from a patient, they have to be stone cold bastards, too. They cut away a lot of healthy tissue surrounding the tumor, just in case some sneaky cancer is hiding inside it. That sacrificed healthy tissue is called a "margin," and it's what pathology lab workers end up looking at most of the day to make sure that a patient's cancer hasn't spread.

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"I appreciate your enthusiasm, but stabbing each individual cell is not an effective treatment."

2

You're Picturing Your Organs All Wrong

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Years of horror movies have probably given you a fairly accurate idea of what the inside of the human body looks like, right? Let's take color for example. We all know that our organs are all shades or red and pink, what with them sitting inside us all day getting marinating in blood. But then there are organs like the gallbladder. Lisa explains: "The gallbladder is bright green!"

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"Shit! She's got plutonium in her chest! We need to rip it ... oh, never mind."

1

The Work Can Be Surprisingly Dangerous

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Zombies aren't real, so why do pathology techs wear chainmail in the labs? According to Lisa, "You always assume that every single specimen is HIV-positive and treat it accordingly, but close calls have happened. Once, one of the residents cut himself while dissecting a specimen from someone with hepatitis. Cutting yourself is actually pretty easy to do. Some people wear chainmail gloves on their non-dominant hand for that reason, but a lot of people don't like them because they interfere with your sense of touch and your dexterity."

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You're performing delicate lab work, not shucking oysters.

"Another time," Lisa continues, "we got a lung specimen that seemed fine, so it was dissected on a regular bench, but then a report came back that it looked like tuberculosis, so we had to isolate all the equipment it had touched, and everyone walked around breathing pretty lightly until we found out how to clean up tuberculosis germs."

Speaking of breathing, there are a few studies out there that suggest that formaldehyde, the thing used to preserve human remains, might actually give you nose cancer if you inhale too much of it. It's why pathology lab techs wear sensors to measure air quality and make sure that it isn't above the allowable limit for all the various chemicals. But as horrifying as that is, it's kind of comforting to think that even in death, our bodies still have the potential to influence other people's lives. It would be nice if it was through something else besides giving them cancer, HIV, or hepatitis, but you take what you can get.

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"If this is your last breakfast burrito, colon, in death you shall have the last laugh."

Lisa is an aspiring nurse practitioner working in LGBTQ and sexual health, and will probably never quite grasp the nuances of normal dinner conversation. Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist, interviewer, and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com.

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