Falling in love with Nellie

Well, for starters, Uncle Chris was the only one who got the completely right answer about the plural of Mongoose, so I owe him coffee (sometime in November?)
Now if you could just tell me the plural of giant tarantulas, because that's what we have over here. And not just a plurality of tarantulas, but lizards (I finally caught one today but he left me his wriggling tail and ran off), frogs, purple jellyfish (apparently they don't sting), mosquitos, termites, ants and one cute black kitty that I glimpsed today.
And then there are the maggots on Nellie. One mustn't forget Nellie. Yesterday I leaned to close to her and some of her body fluid soaked through my paper gown and through my tank top and onto my stomach. When I de-gowned after the lab I was horrified. I scrubbed the shirt with plenty of soap and hung it to dry, but the next day the stain was still there, not to mention the smell. Today we spent another several hours with her and while Brendan and I were peeling the skin off her arm, a chunk of flesh flew up and landed right on the spot between my gloved hand and my sleeve, right on my skin.
The whole dissection stopped. Brendan took his forceps and gently lifted it off of my arm. I considered going to wash right away, but then remembered that the water all across campus was shut off that day because of a burst pipe.
"I'll just suck it up." I told Dr. Rust.
She laughed. "I hope you'all don't do that."
Way to ellicit the gag reflex.
"You really like Nellie, don't you?" Vem joked with me.
"No, Nellie really likes me." I answered, thinking about my stained shirt and how I was going to get it clean.
Hours later we were working on the thorax (chest area) and I helped Dr. Rust cut the ribs so we could lift the chest off. Funnily enough, I think I've done the same thing a number of times with ducks, so I was familiar with where to cut. I wondered if all that duck cleaning would ever come in handy, and it certainly has.
There, underneath the rib cage, was the heart inside its pericardial sac, a glistening fat blob that was just waiting to be opened up. I could feel myself getting excited and after a long time of listening to Dr. Rust explain things about the chest I could hold it in no longer.
"Please, please, please can I open it up?"
"All right, Heather." She laughed, "Go on ahead."
I felt like a heart surgeon operating on a patient. I took my forceps and scissors and gently cut through the pericardial membrane, explaining in a calm voice about the different layers to my classmates. We lifted out the heart carefully and poked and prodded and examined the enlarged blood vessels leading to it and other signs that poor Nellie had been a very sick woman indeed. She even had a pacemaker implanted in her chest, and so we carefully worked on extracting it so we could follow the leads into her heart.
By the time we finished for the day the only word to describe it was carnage. We wrapped Nellie up and de-gowned and went outside into the hot sunshine. Behind one of the bungalows I found a water resevoir with a tap on the side of it, so we scrubbed ourselves there before going for dinner.
I know it might seem morbid to some of you, but seeing inside Nellie's chest today and touching her collapsed lung and cutting her heart out gave me the most wonderful feeling in the world. I haven't felt it for a long time, but I remember it well. Four years ago when I was taking my first biology class at TWU I snuck into the lab after it was closed, and I took a pin and poked a hole in my finger. I made my own blood smear and slid the slide under the microscope before focusing the lens. There before my eyes were my own red blood cells, swimming around like little flat donuts. I remember crying.
Over the last few years I've wondered again and again if this is what I was meant to do, to be a doctor. I tried to explain to people why it was different than being a nurse, and inside myself I wondered if it really was, and if I'd really like it.
I have to tell you, despite some lousy moments, I absolutely love it so far. I'm probably just crying because I'm overtired now, but this is one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done in my life. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, and I'm glad about that, because someone has to fall in love with fixing cars and cooking and working with computers and teaching school and managing businesses. We all have something to do, and thank God it's different for each of us.