Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine. ... to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe. - Abraham Joshua Heschel
Down a long hallway and into a washroom, we stood outside of a door waiting to be let in. The only sound we could hear was a saw - somewhere between a chainsaw and the sound of a dentist's drill. Exciting, no? We were whisked through a room with deep sinks into an open room with rubberized flooring.
Just like that, an embalmer was embalming two bodies (women) lying naked and open on tables. One woman was very small, and one was much larger. They both had limited amounts of muscle mass. The larger one had a flap of skin from about the middle of the back of her head thrown over the front of her face. And the embalmer had just finished drilling through the bone of her skull. In one swift motion, he placed the drill down, and removed a large cup shaped section of her skull revealing her brain.
The brain was like a new-born baby; covered in dura, blood, connective tissue, and miscellaneous fluid. As he was further explaining what he was doing and generally meeting and greeting us he also started to cut away at the nerves and tissues that were connecting the brain to the skull from the inside. I shuffled my Toms from underneath the brain to avoid the trouble of having to clean #brainjuice off of them later.
This entire time my mouth was literally open. I had to remind myself to close it just in case something went spraying during extraction - but I really couldn't close it. My entire class was a mixture of fascination, horror, and raw awe. Everything surprised us. And it was exhilarating.
It is a rare feeling to have: awe, speechlessness, and utter gratitude for the chance to be privy to the secret of what is inside of us all the time; the mind inside grappling with the mind in hand.
WHAT?
I learned a couple of other things in the gross lab.
1. I kind of understand now why my grandmother got her nails done every week without fail. The small woman had two nail tips that were bright red, and the rest of her nails (and toenails) were largely unkempt. I'm not sure why, but this was a glaring feature in a room filled with no color at all. I remember a reference to the nails of
Henrietta Lacks in
this book. This reminded me of that.
So I guess the lesson here is, at some point all of your $hit will be laid bare - if not now, it will be someday. Maybe this is a small admonition to live with that in mind? No one is perfect, but what are you willing to leave behind?
2. We all have different sized livers. Like, the difference has NOTHING to do with your body size really. It mostly has to do with the amount of filtration your body has to do. So, the more that your liver gets used, the bigger it will be. But everything in you is YOURS, is filled with the history of YOU, is unique to YOUR joys, YOUR strife, YOUR pain, YOUR decisions. This may seem painfully obvious to some, but I have needed the reminder as Rob Bell says that, "'YOU' have never been done before." We carry around the burden (the literal WEIGHT) of what we do to our bodies whether we choose to believe it or not. There is no template. We are in a constant state of creation. Renewal is who we are - it is the way of the world.
3. Perfect lungs are hard to find. They don't really exist because we live in places with car exhaust, city gunk, smoke and smog. They filter for you all your life; day in, and day out they are hard at work to turn the air around us into something useful, into something that becomes us.
Even if you don't smoke, you are privy to the general pollution of your surroundings - choose your air carefully.
4. You can feel so much of what is going on in the inside of you by simply feeling for it. This is a part of old-school medicine that I have always loved. Want to know how what kinds of nutritional deficiencies you have?
Stick out your tongue. Clinicians don't operate this way anymore because there are legal reasons for having less subjective tests of course.
Cirrhosis of the liver can be felt by palpating the liver! And now I totally understand why! The liver should always look smooth (beautiful?) - cirrhosis as a result of ANY alcohol consumption can start to occur and you will know if and when you have this if you feel bumps on a patient where there should be smoothness.
The outside of us betrays us more than we think - it's no wonder we are always trying to make this look better. But what's on the outside can never betray what's on the inside.
5. Arteries crack. Your femoral artery is GIGANTIC. The pancreas is such a little guy. How anyone without a gall bladder digests anything is BEYOND me. Your pelvic floor is WONDERful. But the biggest surprise for me with regard to raw anatomy was that the diaphragm is a BAMF - tissue-like through its middle and rife with muscle at its outermost edges. It isn't outlandish to understand why some people can breathe in longer than others, hold a tone longer than others, or exhale more forcibly than others to brace under a barbell. That ish has to be trained because it is a HUGE sheet of NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING. Never take your breath lightly; the diaphragm separates your guts from your heart - but it is more than likely what actually connects the two - it's the muscular bridge to your soul.
All of this means something to me right now especially because I have learned over the last 3 weeks that I really and truly can trust what my body tells me. When it says I am betraying myself, I have to believe it now. When it says to slow down, I must. When it tells me to wait a little longer, or go a little faster, I need to listen. Differentiating between the intuitive voice of my body, and the raw fear of my human-ness is difficult; but I can sense a difference now more than I ever have. And I am trying to be as present as I can to be able to actually hear what my body has to say.
The body knows. It always knows. Even before I know. Especially before I know. Which reminds me of a quote that is pivotal to my sense of myself and has been for the last 10 years:
“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.” - Alfred Adler
