Sunday, September 10, 2000:
The weather outside is:
frightful. Thunder and lightning.
Where's ... The LIGER!?: Probably under this desk. Thunder scares
him. As does noise.
Have to sing out loud song: Wonderful by Everclear.
Latest junk email subject: "How would you like a larger
penis?"
FORMAL de HYDE
Next morning, 8 a.m.
I'm paged by a strangely familiar number.
"Hi Scott, this is Snow. I'm just letting you know we'll be doing that autopsy on Mrs. No-Brainer this morning. The final report won't be done until Monday though."
"Thanks, I'll try to make it down there soon."
Not too soon though. That bone saw doesn’t cut through cranium nearly quick enough.
Dr. Snow was an intern of mine 2 years ago for a month. Since then she's started her pathology residency and got married (to a surgeon, a nice guy actually). That's when we became friends, amidst a backdrop of cancer patients.
I actually first remember her from college microbiology though. How could anyone not? She was tall, slender, with porcelain, seemingly bloodless skin and platinum hair almost as ivory and twice as translucent. Her eyes were as black as an achluophobe's nightmares (darker than mine even). She was always shy in micro lab but oh so serious; her pink lips punctuated in a brief horizontal pout. She would walk by crowds of people with nary a glance other than her destination, and I would take some sort of satisfaction in her reclusiveness.
Once in a while, I would rest my sore microscope-fatigued eyes on her table across the room. Not once did she ever look up from her microscope or notebook. The class was graded on a curve and I knew she would be whipping that curve into shape with her dominatrix-like determination. I resolved to prove that I was her equal if not better. I studied hard.
I ended up doing better than my premed roommates (who had far better memory retention than myself). I had the third highest score on the final, bested by one Ph.D. student. I don't know who got the other higher score, but I always assumed it was her.
Microbiology is still my favorite subject.
Years later, I got teamed up with Dr. Snow on the wards, during introductions I casually mentioned that I remembered her from way back in college microbiology class. She was sincerely embarrassed that she couldn't say the same, but I knew she wouldn't.
"You always looked really determined, in a good way," I said and she smiled and looked down.
"That instructor, Prof. Bendover, he was so ..." she began to recall.
"... flamingly gay?" I finished for her and we both started laughing about the time he demonstrated how DNA is systematically proofread and somehow made it look like an ass-humping train-dance tutorial. Thankfully, I never needed to do extra credit in that class.
That was two years ago. We became friends that month.
Around 10:30 that morning, I eat breakfast and head into the bowels of the Empire. As polished as The Hospital looks on most floors, the basement is literally a dingy labyrinthine dungeon. The walls are ochre and parchment colored brick with permanent oil streaks along the floor where the beeping cart-cabbies clatter by leading trains of caged refuse. The garbage and dirty laundry from all ten hospital floors ends up here. A newer section includes the laboratories of microbiology, hematology, and pathology. And of course, the morgue.
All the turns and bends make it impossible for me to map out where I'm going, but after a couple of wrong turns I finally make it to the morgue.
I stop outside the huge silvery vault door. The sign on it says, "AUTOPSY IN PROGRESS." The door isn’t locked and I cautiously enter.
Seeing the doll-like slabs of open bodies on stainless steel tables brings me back to Anatomy class, first year of medical school. The hardest part of that class for me was never the visuals. On the contrary, human organs possess some of the most strikingly brilliant colors you will ever see in nature. It was the smell that bothered me. The cadavers were all infused and bathed in formaldehyde. It didn’t bother most of the students, but some, like me, simply couldn’t stand the abrasive chemical odor. It seared my eyes and nose and literally made me weep profusely the closer I stuck my face near our cadaver. I always hated how it made me cry no matter how hard I tried to fight it.
Upon entering the autopsy room, I sense the temperature drop. If not for my shirt and whitecoat, it might even be cold, but instead, it's briskly refreshing. I see a man to my left working on a vaguely familiar body. It’s splayed open from sternum to gut. Old, wrinkly, protuberant, but clean and plastic looking. It’s Mrs. No-Brainer from the day before.
Across the chilly room is Dr. Snow. She’s shrouded from head to toe in blue - gown, gloves, mask, and hat. I observe her quiet grace as she sets a filleted intestine into a metal bowl with her elfin fingers. I watch unwatched as neither notices me for an entire minute of this Francis Bacon Ballet. I hesitate then I say,
"Hi Snow."
When she looks up, her endless dark eyes narrow tightly and her coolness fades as she recognizes me and smiles warmly behind her mask. I can tell by her eyes.
"Hi Scott! I didn’t see you there," she exclaims. The intensity of her smile shows in her eyes and voice, and it always feels like a great big hug.
The guy working on the body looks my way briefly and then at Snow as if he doesn’t recognize the tone in his colleague’s voice.
"Um, how’s it going?" I fumble.
"Oh, we’re almost done. We’re going to finish the preparation a little later ... (brief explanation that I completely forgot) .... That way you don’t cut or stab yourself as much during the dissection," she says with her gloved hands clasped like some nether princess in meditation.
"Yeah, hah …" I stop myself when I realize that wasn’t a joke, "Any obvious cause yet?"
"Well, grossly … she had some severe erosive esophagitis which may have caused all that bleeding, and a myocardial infarction inferiorly, probably from the initial blood loss. The lungs were really heavy, probably from congestion. Nothing else really in the stomach, except for lunch," she says as she arranges various tissues on the table for weighing.
"Yeah, that would explain it," I add, somewhat awed by her in a freshman first crush sort of way again. Then I ask,
"Are you always down here these days?"
"Oh no, sometimes I’m in path doing sections, microscope work or fixing slides -- yawn, hehe," watching and listening to Snow talk is fun.
I remember her saying on the oncology wards once,
"I can't wait until I start my pathology residency. I don't really like talking ... to people so much. Heheh."
"Tell me about it," I would agree and then we'd ask each other about our spouses.
She pauses and methodically turns back around to her work. I’m both disappointed and relieved that she returns to work so quickly. But, it is the weekend and this is her passion, I think. Besides, I’m acting stiffer than the corpses in here, and half as social.
I look around at the macabre display a bit longer until I feel like a drive-by gawker. Not wanting to interrupt her work I begin to leave. I thank Snow for calling me, mostly because I can’t think of anything else to say that wouldn’t be possibly disruptive or annoying in her realm of dead meat and cold steel.
"Oh no problem! Come back again! Thanks for coming down!" I catch one more glimpse of those killer smiling eyes under delicate fairy eyebrows. The same ones I studied from afar and used to wish to make eye contact with in another time long buried in my mind.
I leave quietly while wiping my nose and feeling how cold it is. I’m probably one of the least superstitious persons there is, but I realized then that dead things can come back to life sometimes when you least expect it, even in the morgue. I'm just not sure if I should be scared or not.
I almost forgot, there's a NOTIFY list if your E.S.P. is subpar when it comes to guessing when I update.
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