Table 24
by Prachi Gaddam

Shoving my fingers into a dead woman’s armpit wasn’t exactly what I thought would be the highlight of my day, but here we are. I managed to uncover the classic “M” formation of the brachial plexus and tease out the musculocutaneous, median, and ulnar nerves. The towel that covered her face slipped off and I saw her lying there with her eyes closed. I wanted to say she looked at peace. But despite being knuckles deep in her inner tissues, I didn’t really ever know her. At 101 years old, she found herself on Table 24 of the gross anatomy lab. Laying back on the cold metal as the hands of a generally clueless medical student poked through her fascia and accidentally severed her medial pectoral nerve. I wonder if she is looking down at us right now. Would she be proud of the way I gently tore her axillary artery from her posterior cord? Did she really want me to break apart her clavicle with a hammer or bisect her head with a saw from Home Depot? Did she see the way I smiled in triumph when I finally broke through her frontal bone before I realized that I have more in common with an axe murderer than most people can say?

I wonder why she chose this. Was she a physician? Or maybe a nurse? Maybe she loved someone in the field? I think that love is a good reason for donating your body. Love for people. Love for science maybe. Love for the 21 year old medical student who simply cannot learn from textbooks. The kind of love that maybe only a 101 year old can have. I can’t imagine being 101. Honestly, I can’t imagine being 30. Or 40. Or 50. Just like I couldn’t imagine being 21 when I was 5 or being anything but a tiny little human at the age of 1. You know how you yourself can never gauge when you’ve grown taller or gained weight? Change happens whether we realize it or not.

 In fact, the only time I really notice it is when I look at old pictures of myself. I see the fat of my baby cheeks as I’m smiling in the dining hall next to my highschool best friends. I don’t talk to one of them anymore. I see arms covered up in the summer and boots that don’t exactly match my dress. Dyed hair topped with wisps of bangs that have grown way too long. Bangs that were clearly cut on a whim for $10 at SuperCuts. I see a girl at 18 who genuinely believes that she was “mature for her age.” A girl at 19 who’s staring at her phone waiting for the message from a boy who wasn’t worth it. A girl at 20 who hangs around the edge of a group photo. And in my front camera, I see a girl who is not sure what the girl at 25 will think of her. I wonder if she’d look back at her first year medical student self and laugh at how she wasn’t sure if she was smart enough to be here. Maybe she’ll have figured out how to love the awkward curve of her hips or what to say when a friend’s father dies. Or perhaps that’s something we’ll figure out at 30 or 40 or 50.

I looked down at the body laying on Table 24. I mean, at what age do you know who you are?

Did our donor die knowing?