Surgery Anniversary Quotes

Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In

The baby’s first birthday. Surgery day, I point out, because I have trouble calling it birth. Anniversary of the great failure. Ari.

what the hell you were doing when he poked his head up.” Landwehr nodded at the waitress to come dump some more coffee into his cup. He was wearing a starched white shirt and black tie. He ran his fingers along his neck, just inside his stiff white collar. Then he told me. The morning it happened, he was standing beside his wife’s hospital bed. She’d just had stomach surgery, and he was waiting for the anesthesia to wear off. It was March 17, 2004, the twenty-seventh anniversary of Shirley Vian’s murder. “My phone rang,” he recalled. “It was a detective in my unit. ‘We just got a letter,’ he said. ‘Looks like it could be from BTK.’” “How’d that make you feel?” I asked, sipping my coffee. “Sick to my stomach,” Landwehr said. “I thought, ‘We could be in a lot of trouble, here’ . . . But the more I thought about it, the more I realized we had a chance to finally catch this guy.