The Body

At I type this out, I am furiously chewing on some very minty gum. The super-duper-heavy-duty-minty gum a la LW or BK might come in handy this quarter. I am chewing this gum because today we met The Body. The Body, by the way, is an African American male. I can't tell how old he is, but he's still got a bunch of tubes sutured into him, so he wasn't in very good shape when he died. He does, however, have a nicely shaped skull, from what I can tell. It is slightly deformed because they opened it to take out the skull.

No cutting was done today; all we did was wrap the body. It turns out that we wrap bodies in strips of rags soaked in a dilute phenol solution (eeeww! carcinogen!) to help them retain moisture and to prevent fungal growth. So essentially, we made a mummy. The heads, hands, and feet have, in addition to the sheets, a black plastic bag over them as an extra barrier to dehydration. Putting a black plastic bag over the head was weird, but in a way I'm glad that we did because it depersonalizes the body.

Mummy making did not take long, so afterwards we went out for coffee. I ordered a Mexicana milkshake which I've been meaning to try for weeks. It was good -- not overly sweet with some nice crunchy bits mixed in. It was pleasant to sit out there in the sun, sipping on a milkshake, in good company. But half way through it, I suddenly caught a whiff of cadaver. Eventually it felt like the smell was caught in the back of my throat, and while it wasn't that bad in the context of a dissection room, I couldn't drink milkshake anymore. I tasted the smell when I swallowed, the the crunchy bits made me want to gag. And that is why the rest of the milkshake is in the fridge and I am furiously chewing gum.