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My Dissection: My Experience In Aesthetics

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At some point in the wall of the right atrium neighboring itself to the sinus venarum at the junction where the superior vena cava enters the right atrium, the SA node sits quietly. After sitting on a lab stool hunched over the clean, ebony tables, meticulously carving and stitching the heart, I had finally reached the point of the anatomy lesson that I had been waiting years to do. Many people describe dissection as a surreal and dream-like experience. For hours, sweating into latex gloves and getting lost in the glossy organs of an unnamed mammal, tends to get very complex and is often a perplexing adventure through the maze of tissue and preserving chemicals. After lobbing off the top quarter of the heart, I now had access to the atria valves. Before I anxious stuck my fingers in and …show more content…

Not in the sense that I had some ultimate mission to “save” this already post-mortem cow, but that the scalpel and dissecting hook felt like extensions of my own fingers, as if they had been meant by fate to be placed into my hands. I wondered if this what the doctors at the hospital I volunteered at felt like, as though it was some sort of common phenomenon. In a glum revelation, I puzzled if my time volunteering truly meant anything. After clocking countless hours of having child after sick child fall asleep in my arms or organizing various “Cupcakes for Caregivers” on the Volunteer Board, it seemed now as if my work was trivial and little league. However, in another perspective, if this cow were a human child, I would love for a warm-hearted teenager to spend time cuddling it back to health, maybe even once or twice singing along in a terribly off-key manner to Frozen or another children’s movie she will later swear she doesn’t know all the words too. Even as I watched my grandmother slowly deteriorate and succumb to the chemotherapy that was truly doing more harm than good, it gave me a sense of comfort to know that she was surrounded by love.

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