Be careful what you wish for

The last few days I have been thinking about a certain topic and today I had the chance to learn the lesson the hard way.
The Israelites, when they were wandering in the desert for 40 years, complained about their diet and God granted their request and sent them quail to eat. However, it was not without a cost. Psalm 106 says "He gave them what they asked for, but sent a wasting disease among them." I guess those Israelites thought they knew what they wanted, but it turned out to be a little more than they bargained for.
All of us humans are like that. We have this idea about what we want. It may even be a legitimate and good desire, and we cry out to God and pray for it. But sometimes the unfortunate thing is, he answers our prayers and gives us what we asked for, but at the cost of something. Until we learn to want what God wants, not what we want.
So I experienced this firsthand today. This week when I finished up my practicum Dr. G asked me if there was anything I wanted to see or do before I was done.
On my list of things to do before I die is 'see an autopsy', so I asked her if she could arrange it.
"No problem! I'll call the morgue!"
The pathologist was happy to have me and I took the stairs down to the cold crypts of the hospital basement and followed the dingy twisted hallways to the sign hanging from the ceiling that said 'Morgue.'
I came in and they got me scrubs and shoe covers and led me into the brightly lit room where autopsies were conducted. There was a whiteboard covering one wall that said 'Welcome to the Morgue' and then underneath it, '39 days without a maggot'.
Lying on the stainless steel gurney was a body, an older man with a nasogastric tube still hanging out of one nostril and a label around his stiff white toe.
"Shall we get started?" The pathology assistant asked.
I helped her take off his gown and using a ruler, measure him and his hair length and his scars and marks, etc. He had been dead a few days but was well preserved and cold and he looked as if he was just sleeping, except for his mouth which was wide open, and his sunken blue eyes, which stared at me where I stood.
He looked slightly familiar, but I thought, perhaps all old naked men look slightly familiar. He had several interesting scars down his chest, and looking at them I immediately deduced he had had open heart surgery, abdominal surgery, and looking at his leg I saw the scar where a vein graft had been harvested from. I felt his chest and through his cold rubbery skin I could feel the sharp tips of the wires that had been used to wire his breastbone together after his heart surgery.
We began to cut him open and dissect out his internal organs, looking for suspicious things. There was hardening of one of his lung lobes suggesting pneumonia. Stiff whitened areas of his major arteries suggested calcification leading to occluded blood vessels and heart disease. In his intestines there was a hard (probably cancerous) lump that had obstructed his bowels.
"Take your pick." the pathologist said. "He could have died from any of these."
Another body was brought in, this one a forensic case (involved in a criminal investigation), so she was accompanied by police officers who spent half an hour taking photos of her body and looking like they were going to throw up at the sight of the already dissected man on the other table.
The woman was freshly dead so her blood hadn't had much time to solidify and when her abdominal cavity was opened up, it was filled with bright fluid.
"Double glove." One of the pathologists told me. "This lady had hepatitis A,B and C. And who knows what else."
Single gloving is appropriate for emptying a bedpan as a nurse but not when you're wrestling to get a ribcage open and the shards of bone pierce through your gloves.
I took a few moments to go look at the chart of the man we'd been autopsying and suddenly I realized why he looked familiar. I knew him: he had been a patient of mine in the hospital. I suddenly had this eerie feeling, remembering him sitting up in bed and talking to me. What if he suddenly sat up from the table and started talking to me again?
One of the assistants took me for a tour of the morgue. He showed me the walk-in freezer that could accommodate nine bodies, and the ceiling-to-floor crypts labeled "Body parts" (he showed me the bags of thumbs and feet), "Stillborns", "Police case", and others. The smell was horrendous. I struggled to control my gag reflex and breath through my mouth.
Back at the table the assistant enlisted my help to 'string the bowels' (removing the tissues holding the intestines together so they could be laid out like a fat string of sausage). At one point I accidentally nicked the intestine and to my horror, the intestinal contents started to escape. There is really no nice way to describe it, so I'll leave it to your imagination.
I stood at the sink with the pathologist and he dissected each one of the internal organs in turn and discussed it with me.
"See the general crater-like appearance of these kidneys? This is an indicator of hypertension" (high blood pressure). "And this ovary? It's very tiny, which is likely because the woman was going through menopause."
He slipped one of the lungs into a metal basin hanging from the ceiling to weigh it.
"See how this one is twice the size of the other lung? She had significant pneumonia, and all this clear fluid oozing out of the tissues is pus."
As I was standing there a realization suddenly hit me. Some gross things in life I can handle. Some gross things I can put up with once and a while. But this is disgusting. I never, ever want to work in a morgue. In fact, I don't even want to be here right now.
It was several hours before I could take my leave. I tried to wash the formaldehyde smell out of my hands but I'm pretty sure it's there for a while. I walked back along the dingy hallways and thought, now I can cross that off my list. But strangely, there was no joy.
It reminded me of bigger, more important things in life. I often think I know what I want, or what I need. But really a lot of the time I have no clue. They say you should be careful what you wish for because you might actually get it. Personally I think I'm going to take that to heart and re-write my list-of-things-to-do-before-I-die tonight.