I know the book talks about the human body and is also an exhibit, so an exhibit on the human body. And I think unfortunately as you go through the medical training experience from the first day of med school till you’re done with residency, the human body can get more and more dehumanized almost and become a bit of an exhibit in itself.
And in the worst case scenario, kind of people are practice dummies for people to do procedures on and things like that. So I think when people start med school, the majority are really idealistic humanists or at least based on people’s essays that they write for admission. And I know when I first started anatomy, I had a really hard time with the face. Actually, for our group, we covered the face of the cadaver with a washcloth or a towel or something. So we weren’t always looking at the face when we were dissecting because it was really hard. That really humanized the person to see their face.
And then when you get to the second semester, it’s never in the first semester, I think almost everywhere it’s in the second semester, you actually have to peel the face-off and it is the most gruesome thing I’ve ever had to do because you got to learn the eye muscles and the cheek.
So you kind of have to change your insides to be able to do that. It’s really hard. And then the summer after my first year, I was in the emergency room doing rotations in the summertime, in the night. And there were a lot of gunshot victims that would come in. There’s a pretty poor rating on gun violence and gun control in the Kentucky, Ohio area. So Friday and Saturday night there would be three, four, five people shot that would come in all the time. It wasn’t unusual.
But it was a little unusual one of those days where the EMS called ahead and they said they were bringing in a teenager 16, 17, 18 and who’d been shot in the chest and they radioed when they were in the parking lot right outside the door. And they lost the heartbeat just outside the door. So they came busting in and one of the EMTs was on top of the stretcher doing CPR, keeping him intubated. And see, I still remember this strongly, but the trauma surgeon started opening this metal. I mean, it was a toolbox, like an old rusty metal toolbox, opening the toolbox. But it had sterile equipment inside.
And as soon as the patient got on the stretcher in the trauma room, everyone’s pulls on these paper suits because there was blood everywhere very soon after all of this starts. He just sliced open the chest and put in these metal brackets that then you crank open and you’re staring at the inside of the chest. And he puts his hands in there and he was looking for some kind of injury that he could fix.
It’s pretty unusual to do that procedure at all, thoracotomy. It’s even more rare to find something that you can fix. If someone’s heartbeat stops because there’s no blood in their heart, that’s not super fixable. And it’s even more rare for people who’ve had that done to walk out of the hospital cognitively intact. So it’s really kind of a Hail Mary last-ditch kind of thing. So it didn’t work. The teenager’s last heartbeat was the one that he had in that parking lot. And he was young, he was fit, he was healthy, he looked like he’d been exercising.
And so he was just laying there on the table, chest open. And everyone starts peeling off their booty covers. And they were like paper, I mean, just bloody paper trash everywhere. It was a mess. Pools on the floor. And these days they tend to do a short memorize, not memorizing moment, memorializing moment, or a debrief. There wasn’t a debrief that day.
Everyone just kind of filtered off and started taking care of other people. And then me and one other student were there, kind of stunned because I don’t think either of us had ever seen someone die in front of us before. And the cleaners came in and then the trauma surgeon was still there, the one who had opened the chest.
And he calls us over to look inside as education. And so we go in and look and the heart is right there. And in a way, his body became a little bit of an exhibit to teach us. And it just, it didn’t feel quite right. It felt almost like a violation. And then I kind of remember thinking about the kids’ parents when they come to pick up their son.
Two traumas happened that day. One was when he got shot and the other one was when that surgeon opened up his chest. And if the chances were so abysmally, incontestably low that that was going to be successful, I really almost wish they hadn’t done it. And it made me think, did they do it because they like doing it? Did they do it because they wanted to teach other people how it’s done? When people are dying, I think sometimes doctors go to these real medical heroics. There’s this huge urge to do something, do something, do something. And in some cases, the wheel has stopped spinning. You can’t just tell the Grim Reaper to go away when they’re sitting right there. So there was a lot that happened that evening.
My Anatomical Journal 