Gut reactions

I thought I had finished with gross anatomy when we nailed Nellie May into her coffin and burned our lab clothes. Well, I was wrong. For my neuroscience class we have scheduled lab time and yesterday was our first day. 7:30 in the morning found us outside the anatomy lab.
I took off my clothes and put on an old pair of pants and a top, and then suited up with a paper lab coat, shoe covers, gloves and a mask. Inside the lab the air conditioner unit had sprung a leak and half the floor was flooded.
“Ya’ll don’t slip.” Dr. Rust said in her Southern drawl.
Don’t worry, I thought, I have no intention of contacting this floor with any part of my body.
We spread plastic out on one of the lab benches and I opened up the giant bucket of brains. I lifted them out of the formaldehyde one by one and Vem set them on the table. Whole brains, separate lobes, cerebelli, brain stems, etc. They were slimy and soft and we handled them carefully so as not to damage them.
“All right.” Dr. Rust began. “Now this here is the frontal lobe. These are the temporal lobes, and above them, the parietal lobes. They are separated right here by the Sylvian fissure…”
The formaldehyde was 35% and it began to sting my eyes and burn my throat. It was smoking hot in the lab and after a while I fought to open one of the windows. All of our eyes were watering. The smell had kind of settled and wasn’t too bothersome, but the sight of these mushy gray brains sitting on the table was enough to elicit the gag reflex in the strongest of people. I tried to focus.
We went through all sorts of parts of the brain and poked and prodded, but I hardly remember any of it cause my eyes were stinging. We worked as long as we could and then stumbled outside and took off our clothes. It had been raining outside but it was hot and humid. I walked back to Nikki’s room to wash off and we sat on the porch for a minute, feeling depressed about how gross the lab was.
I know it’s called gross anatomy, but somehow a year ago when I was writing my paper on cadaver research and looking at pictures of sterile labs, I imagined it to be a lot different. But pictures on the internet don’t include the smell. They don’t include the gut reaction you experience when you are holding a scalpel over a body and told to cut out their eyes.
And the gut reaction is really unconscious, uncontrolled, and unexpected. It is not something you plan out, but it is something that you have to plan to deal with. So far I haven’t had any problems dissociating my emotions from working with these dead bodies. Instead of the emotional experience I thought it was going to be, it is glaringly clear that they are not persons- they are just a pile of rotting cells. The only reaction that I’ve experienced has been a visceral reflex due to the smell and the grossness of it. It is not moral repugnance; it is a gut reflex.
But the same feeling- the nausea, the horror- connects to a very different emotion as well. Dr. Rust told us about her 10-month old patient who had been sexually abused. I am beginning to understand my emotions more. It’s not appropriate to wimp out of being in the anatomy lab because I’m grossed out by a slimy brain and putrid flesh. But the rage I feel about a baby who was raped is appropriate. And yes, I need to keep it in while I’m looking after the baby, but afterwards, Dr. Rust told me she has a punching bag that hangs on her porch. It keeps you from having a come apart, she told me. Sometimes you have to do it.