First cuts -- 8/23/23
By: Nishika Navrange, she/her
I don’t know how to describe the first woman that I ever cut into. Any description that first comes to mind is purely factual. It doesn’t capture the strange combination of sensations that passed over me—the smell of her, the sight of her raw, emaciated body and bony limbs, the vague feeling of disconnectedness that overtook me. Her identity was neatly inked onto an index card—91 year old female, died of dementia and dysphagia, university professor. Those were all the words I had about her life. The rest of her was splayed out before me—I would get to analyze every inch of her body, extract the heart that pumped her through nearly a century of life, dissect the brain that had eventually rebelled against her.
I couldn’t reconcile that this was both a body and a person. At one point, she had life. She was life. And now, as cliché as it sounds, she was merely skin and bones. I couldn’t stop reading the story imprinted onto that skin, the burdens borne by those bones. I remember seeing the white fuzz of hair that covered her scalp, the sunspots across her arms, her gnarled hands. The fingers on her right side were curled, as if she had been holding onto something in her final breaths. She was stiff, trapped in that moment. Her face was covered in gauze. It didn’t escape me that her eyes were right there, under a strap of white. A dog tag dangled from her blackened toe, formaldehyde oozing from below her left calf.
We cut into her chest, making small incisions with a scalpel. Her body was tough. We created a flap of skin, below which was a webbed layer of yellow adipose. The fat would look the same, I learned, if I cut under my own skin. I felt so far removed from this object before me, yet intimately connected knowing that her body somehow mirrored my own.
She was a university professor. She still has so much to teach me.
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