Tuesday, September 02, 2003
My New Best Friends
I just met him last Wednesday, and I've already spent more time with him than anyone else these past six days. When I'm not with him, I'm thinking about him. I spend late nights with him, and when we're alone I can tell him anything. His name is "Puddles." He's a 25-pound Beagle with velvet floppy ears and a fuzzy muzzle. And he's been deceased for quite a while now, thought he is very well preserved.
Our Anatomy Lab team named him "Puddles" because the first time we took him out of his plastic bag he leaked formalin all over the floor. The name just kinda stuck. Anyway, I think he is one of the cutest dogs in the world, but I cannot forget to mention "Pickles" the cat. She, too, is well preserved ("pickled") with formalin, and she is actually a purebred Siamese. They are both very cute animals, and as we poke around under their skins with our probes and foreceps and scalpels, I think about the lives they may have had, the people whose lives they were a part of, and how they may have come to this end. One of my lab partners comments that all the animals in lab must have had rough lives. I concur.
This Little Piggie
The first time I dissected a mammal my freshman year of high school, they called it a "fetal pig," but it was misnamed because it was pretty much a full term piglet. It had whiskers, eyelashes, and when I looked closely, I could even see little pink eyebrows. When I first removed it from its bag, it was plump and pink with supple translucent skin. Its snout grinned. I had trouble that first time opening up the body cavity and looking at its guts, but as the days went by, the piglet became more wrinkled, squished, and less resembling a piglet than a rubber chicken. I didn't have a problem with the piggie anymore. BUT I
did have a problem when I went home to the family pet Shi-tzu, "Oreo," whose size and body shape closely resembled that of my piggie; every time I looked at Oreo I saw my piggie, with its belly cut open and all. When I pet Oreo's belly, all I could think of was all the organs barely a few millimeters underneath my hand, beating, churning, full of blood. Suddenly my pet seemed more vulnerable, and of course that led me to thinking about people, and about our insides, protected merely by a few centimeter of muscle and fat (well, now it's more than a few centimeters. . . but that's a different matter altogether).
These days I guess I'm just used the to fact and that we all have organs and blood under our skin, that we all die eventually--yes, even the most innocent and sweetest of pets. Either that or the motivation to learn the insides of the canine and feline bodies outweigh whatever sympathy I may have for the creatures we are cutting open. It's strange to look adoringly at Puddles' face, pat him on the head and say "good dog," just as I prepare to cut the furry skin, pads and all, away from his forepaw.
