It's not so pretty inside out ... (nugget 5)

Once we reached there, though, curiosity got the better of us. God only knew what these fabled cadavers looked like. Oh, we’d heard stories alright. Skin peeled off, organs hanging loose, faces split right down the middle … in short, the substance of your worst nightmares. The doors to dissection had glass windows in the middle, so we could see through them into the hall. And yes, there were bodies on the tables by the time we got there. I stepped up to the window to have a look.
Surprisingly, what I saw didn’t affect me. True, I could see a shrunken head and a shrivelled body with muscles spilling out, but it didn’t seem that bad. Then again, maybe the windows were designed to distort the figures inside, to make them seem less gruesome. Maybe that was the only way they got students to enter DH in the first place. Oh crap.
2.00 p.m. – the doors were thrown open and we were ushered in to dissection hall. Holding my breath, I slowly walked in, looking at the expressions of those ahead of me to gauge their reactions. Nothing to suggest either relief or disgust. Oh right, they’d been holding their breath too. Stupid me. Ok, enough’s enough. One, two, three ….. I took in a delicate whiff of air. Nothing. Puzzled, I took a deeper breath. What was going on? I couldn’t smell anything remotely revolting. Around me I could see other people do the same thing and for a minute, the scene was oddly comical. We were like a pack of trained sniffer dogs gone crazy. One of the post-graduates, sounding highly amused, told us that the air-conditioning would rid the room of any formalin smell we were anticipating. Ah. Technology.
One fear conquered, it was time to face the next. I was directed to table 1, which unfortunately, was the closest to the one seating the professors and post-graduates. I got my first close up view of the cadaver. Let’s see … face intact, although it was missing skin everywhere except around the lips, chest opened – Wait… were those lungs??? - , rest of the body pretty much intact except for the arms and legs, which were completely devoid of skin. I could see individual muscles running down the length of the arm, and I remember feeling, not disgusted, but amazed. So this is what muscles really look like.
After roll call, our class began. There were 20 students at each table, and two instructors- one for bones or osteology and another for the body, also called soft tissue.
Following the initial shock, I realised that DH, no matter what its initial interest quotient, was first and foremost a class, and nothing proved this more than the fact that fifteen minutes into the professor’s explanation, most people- especially those lucky ones, who, unlike us, had actually eaten lunch- had fallen asleep.
At the end of the hour, it was time for osteology. The post-graduate taking our table, Dr. Sapna was another monument to sarcasm… all 6 feet of her. What is it with the anat department? Must be something in the communal water cooler. Inspite of everything, she taught well and unlike the professors, thought we were insane to worry about exams. Initially, I may have questioned her sanity, but after one year it makes complete sense. The levels of stress you’re subjected to in medical school vary tremendously, and after surviving a University exam, it seems trivial, even foolish, to worry about a weekly internal test.
She ended by telling us to buy individual bone sets, and immediately conversation broke out. An entire bone set? Elementary school had taught us that there were 206 of them. The practically oriented people wanted to know if all the bones would fit into one bag. The studious ones wanted to know whether they had to know everything about all the bones. The rest of us simply wanted to know where to get them from. Dr. Sapna gave us a patronising look, like she couldn’t believe we were clueless enough to ask her that. It was obvious, wasn’t it? The Bone Man.
Now why did he sound like the lead character of a B-grade horror movie??