We still don't know everyone's names, or homes, or work, but this morning was the first time I felt a deeper cohesion emerging in the larger group, when in circle individuals began to speak not just of their clinical observations but of themselves. How it felt removing the skin from the genitalia. How the reason she came was because she knew this was where she'd be uncomfortable, and she wanted to grow. So many rich, brilliant, insightful, experienced individuals in one room, all willing to go on a trip through the unknown, doing something that no one else is doing. Traversing uncharted territory. Literally. We're a roomful of renegades led by revolutionaries, dissecting in a way that no one else dissects. Literally. I thought I was lucky. I realize at this point that "lucky" doesn't even begin to cut it.
Aaaaaaaand back to skin. Again. I'm so ready to be done with skin, and that thought manifests verbatim as words of a classmate whom I meet in the bathroom on break. Most of us are essentially down to fingers and toes. Imagine peeling a tiny, twisty knob of ginger in one perfect piece without taking a chunk of ginger with it, and you'll have some idea of how impossible it's seeming. I'm getting annoyed with my teammates for leaving dirty tools on our clean tray, and I'm overhearing tense conversations from classmates nearby about yoga techniques and teachings and styles and intentions. Passionate opinions being questioned, beliefs being challenged, and everyone trying to stay civil but the edges of defensiveness being palpable. We each start wandering away from the table as less work needs to be done, and I'm in a spent daze before having a chance to recover at lunch and return to look afresh.
The larger group comes to a point of completion with the skin created, observed, and now discarded. We turn our ladies and gents to supine, and he gathers us all together in the center of the lab to call our attention to what we're now in the presence of.
"There isn't one professor at any medical school in the world that's seen what you're looking at now. Not one."
What he's referring to, obvious to us, is the 12 forms in one room, each lying with their entire layer of superficial fascia, a.k.a. subcutaneous tissue, a.k.a. adipose tissue, a.k.a. fat, entirely exposed. "And you won't find a picture of anything like this in any anatomy book." Anywhere. THIS is humanity. This is the fleecey blanket that wraps and holds us, this is layer that we judge harshly and love deeply. This is what communicates and emotes and touches and feels. This is a goddamn organ, people, and you can't separate the breast from the thigh from the chin from the calf, yet we culturally, arbitrarily decide in what places it should and shouldn't exist. Gil's known for accepting larger donors that med schools would reject due to their greater difficulty to dissect. "Someone's been rejected their whole life because of their weight and now they're gonna be rejected when they're dead for the same reason? No, give 'em to me. I'll love 'em."
And he holds our hand through the beginning of the dissection of this magnificent layer so that we can love 'em too. The tools are the same but the process is almost entirely different. The layer is thick and juicy and fluffy and soft, with lobules of fat that on Rose's upper arm look like yellow pomegranate seeds and on her upper back squish like dark fig jam. I start with my scalpel and find the deep fascia with my fingers and start to separate the two, using the back of the blade to pluck and the side of the blade to paddle and my finger to melt, melt, melt to create the layer. It's emerging SO fast along her belly and her ribcage and her breast that every other second I catch myself saying "oh my god" out loud. I stand on a stool to get a better angle and nearly fall off, I uncover an abdominal hernia and Gil tells me I remind him of his sister. The energy of the room has shifted tremendously to light, fast, playful and soft, and I feel softer and squishier inside myself. So after we clean up I join nearly half the group in a walk to Alta Plaza Park where we pick lavender and lie on the grass, heads on bellies in a pile of contagious laughter and sighs and head scratches and human contact. I still don't know these people, but I'm beginning to really like them.
