One time, in the first month or so of medical school, my labmate and I went into anatomy lab at dusk to review our donor’s back muscles. Unfortunately, we had recently finished dissection of her thorax, so Sarah and I found ourselves tasked with the job of turning her over. We clutched our donor’s frail body to ours, ignoring the moist stains on our plasticky lab gowns, hoping to execute a gentle roll and flip. I supported her shoulders and Sarah held her feet, but her thin body was much heavier than anticipated, and somehow we ended up in the ludicrous position of supporting her full body weight, a step or two away from the lab table. For a terrifying moment, it seemed like we were about to drop her; blessedly, we managed to stagger back to the safety of the table. Our nerves gave way, and we both collapsed into shaky laughter.
Anatomy lab is a medical school rite of passage. Every year, as summer cools into fall, thousands of naïve, eager First Years across the country meet their very first patient. Facing one’s donor is an emotional moment for many. It can be a carousel of apprehension, fear, gratitude and peace, but there is also an inevitable feeling of loss as the semester progresses and those poignant aches settle into a cooler, business-like approach.
Our donors are our first patient, our teachers—and they can also be our loved ones, our family, our friends, ourselves.
My essay, The Strike, addresses how startling and disquieting that comparison can be in moments of loss and loneliness. It ends with the narrator, confronted with dissecting through the donor’s zygomatic bone in the wake of her grandfather’s passing, leaving the lab, overwhelmed by dissonance, discomfort, and grief. It’s primarily an emotional piece, and it was cathartic to write. I write no parables and my piece offers no lessons. But sometimes, when I look back on those first years, I ache for a message, a framework, something that settles the messy box of emotions that anatomy lab conjured.
Fortunately, the poignancy of this medical school “universal experience” is such that it’s been explored by many medical writers. When I read Chrissie DyBuncio’s essay “Gross Anatomy,” (Fall 2022 Intima), I felt a sense of closure. It acknowledges the frustration of this inherently dissonant experience, the struggle of holding empathy while engaging in destruction, the disgust that accompanies a temporary retreat into humor or dissociation. The conversations in her head – Does he have children? Can we be excited to discover the blood clots that catalyzed a family’s loss? What have we become? – were so familiar to me that they registered as reassuring, not horrifying, as her narrator fears.
But beyond the validation of companionship, DyBuncio, a Filipina-American writer and former physician, answers the question my piece raises. How do I confront this combination of grotesqueness and grief? This swirling mess of emotions that feels like a rejection of humanity? I could identify the horror and the love, but reconciling the two felt beyond my reach.
And DyBuncio writes, confirming and responding:
“Taking him apart took me apart too. Maybe that was the secret all along: that we are at our most human when we feel another’s anatomy as our own.”
In “The Strike,” my narrator flees the lab, disoriented and overcome. DyBuncio stays. Reading her work, years later, I can recognize these are not opposing emotions, but sequential ones. The fracture comes first. Meaning, if and when it comes, will arrive later.
Pallavi Kenkare is a third-year medical student at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine. She graduated from Cornell University in 2021, where she served as opinion editor for the Cornell Daily Sun. Before medical school, she worked as a journalist for CNET and ZDNET. She hails from Atlanta, Georgia.