Ode to A Cadaver

Hey people reading Jodi's blog. I have so many updates but I will do one major one in August when this is all done I think. Can't find enough time to write everything I want to write. Exams, research projects, seminars, professional interviews, and case studies are consuming my life. Just wanted to write a quick "thank you" to a cadaver I worked with today.

I came into lab with a classmate today and examined her cadaver's body because we have an approaching practical on Wednesday. We are covering lots of material (therefore lots of structures in the body...you know all those arteries that run everywhere? I have to be able to name all of them. Whew.) Anyway, the cadaver she works with was a man who died at the very young age of 53 from metastatic melanoma. His entire body is covered in tumors. We're talking tumors on the skin, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines, muscle, fatty tissues...everywhere. I have been so busy dissecting and examining body parts, that I have been slowly dehumanizing these people as the weeks pass. When I looked at this cadaver, I almost began to cry. Here was a man, who out of pure devotion to science and indirectly, my future, decided to donate his body fully knowing what we would be doing to it. Meanwhile, he spent the last weeks of his life most likely suffering the worst death imaginable. The pain from all those metastatic tumors invading his organs, he has large bowel obstructions from the tumors that caused his small bowel to look like the large descending colon, he has an enormous tumor in his stomach that probably caused him lots of nausea and vomiting...he was mostly likely NPO (couldn't eat anything by mouth) in the last months of his life. He has pain patches all over his external body; probably delivering large doses of morphine as a means of palliative care before he died. From seeing all of this, I got so sad...knowing he may still have a mourning wife, children, relatives, friends still out there, being as young as he was. I just wanted to thank this man and his family for allowing me to examine his body so I can learn from him, and attain my ultimate goal of becoming a PA. I hope that his family/friends, and maybe his soul, can be comforted by the fact that by donating his body, despite his and their suffering, he can teach future clinicians basic anatomy and ultimately become clinicians that treat, and hopefully cure, patients just like him.
Thanks.