I just started studying medicine two weeks ago.
It's been a few days since I started peeling human skin.
The first thing I noticed when we recieved the corpse (it had been stored in a special room) was that he was an old man.
He was wrapped up in a plastic bag and I couldn't really see but I could sort of tell from the silhouette.
He was stiff and heavy.
His legs lay apart around his knee and he had eight toes - five on the left, three on the right.
I couldn't look at his face at first; it was more shocking than I had expected to touch a dead man.
We will probably never know why or when he died.
His cranium was cut open and sewn, and there was something - most likely a part of his brain - coming out.
It got onto my hand when we carried him to our table... I could feel it right through my gloves.
The smell of formalin was pretty strong but there was a slightly fishy, fatty smell that made me feel sick for the first few hours.
But
as we shaved his body (he had some hair left on his head too!) and went on to
peel his skin on the posterior side, I got used to it eventually, and could look
at his face too. His whole body sort of
resembled that of my grandfather who died this month 12 years ago. But when I said it aloud, everyone else said
they didn't want to relate the corpse with anyone they knew. My friend (outside school) said he couldn't see why we would be
able to *not* give him a name when we were going to work with him almost every day
for more than three months, but right now, I can't imagine anyone giving him a
name.
After class
though, we went to a nearby steakhouse and ate as we talked about the corpse.
The dessert sort of tasted like formalin.
