tomorrow is our permanent address

Quote of the day:
"Kasi, yung bird niya-"
- Allison, on Nightwing's costume

---

This morning while waiting for my groupmates to feel like starting dissecting I opened the door to Dualan's fire exit and went out and just sat there on the first step of flecked-black metal stairs, which, yeah, was as melodramatic as all hell, but I needed someplace quiet, okay? Someplace to sit and write or alternatively sit and not-write and be out of the way of all the people. I love the people- I cannot believe that I am saying this, but there you have it- but I'm not good at keeping my head on straight at the best of times, and I've never had those best of times. Once upon a time- well, we've all been all sorts of people once upon a time. Once upon a time I was this crazy bossy perfectionist kid, the one who made things work, the one who carried scissors everywhere and wrote stories, and once upon a time I was this girl who was dead bored and wanted to live forever. She had bright cold smiles and history-book dreams and fifty thousand unrequieted loves and she never, ever let anyone else in.

I need to keep my head on straight, because- okay, I know that there are people you can trust, not just in the way that means you're pretty sure they won't kill you in your sleep, not just because you know exactly what they're going to do. Trust as in the functional human being definition. I know this cognitively. It just doesn't process very well, which sounds horrible. And my one attempt at it kind of collapsed magnificently, which is okay, really, things like that happen, and I'm fine, because I will always be fine, just not, you know, fine with making another attempt. But I don't want to be that girl again, I don't want to never let people know that I appreciate the fact that they exist, and I need to remember that.

---

Last dissection day today. I spent mine in Siberia at the table beside ours, skeletonizing the branches of the renal artery, teaching other people the branches of the renal artery, laughing with the Intarmedkids, and not remembering to eat. Allison and I stepped out to buy milk tea around three, and of course when we got back Elaine was screaming at me that we had to have a group picture and where did I go.

And- I never loved Dualan, see, and maybe one day I will regret spending so much of my time there wanting to be somewhere else, but I don't know that yet. What I do know: organs, innervations, musculature and vasculature. To go for forceps before scalpels. To never let Kevin Llamas near any vessels you want intact. How to keep your bangs out of your cadaver without the assistance of either hair nets or headbands. (With practice, and with a little help from your anatomates.)  How to keep your cadaver safe from Siberia's mold infestation. (By wholeheartedly accepting the fact that there is no such thing as too much Lysol.) How it feels to spend three hours isolating arteries and nerves and attaching names to them, and then sit down after ferreting out the terminal branches, and get it. (Like applause you know is meant after the curtain call, only infintely worse-smelling; like nothing else in the world.)

I'll never be able to say it right, but: best teachers, first patients. Ours had a supreme turbinate and an accessory obturator artery branching from the obturator artery and a really large celiac trunk and an abnormal left leg and ampalaya stuck in his esophagus and a really badly-dissected face. The anatomates said thank you to him there at our table beside the window and the exhaust fan, which. Guys.

---

Dat dat dat sa aking dat dat dat doo sounds like music now. Here's to us.

Question number fiftysomething of yesterday's written exam went something like this:

Lucas Podolski, German attacker, attempted a bicycle kick and collided with a teammate, falling to the ground on all fours-

I cannot remember the rest of the question. All I know is that I spent about five minutes laughing hysterically into my paper and trying to be quiet about it because other people were taking an exam, for goodness's sake, and I almost do not even care if I fail that exam, because this whole med school business is made worth it just by random Lukas Podolski on the test questionnaire, never mind if his name's misspelled. Lukas. Podolski.

And look, med school may be like going to hell in a Formula One racer, if with more cadavers involved (aside: there are no words for how relieved I was to get to our cadaver during the lab exam. If there have to be words they are: very, very relieved. I doubt anyone who has not dissected a cadaver will get this, how you end up understanding your cadaver (I call him the Patient; I talk to him, sort of, he's a patient), how you know where everything goes, and in the middle of an exam, nothing is better than knowing where everything goes, regardless of what the actual questions were, and this was such a very long aside), and I still don't know what I'm doing here, but then things like that happen, like Lukas Podolski's name on your test questionnaire, or looking at your groupmates and all of you saying at once that yup, how you skinned your cadaver's leg made it look a bit like shawarma, or staying at a classmate's condo till past midnight trying to get something done, or carrying a bag of bones around and making stupid "I'm armed well no technically I'm legged" jokes with friends while waving femurs, and getting up in the morning seems like something a sane reasonable person would do, and I am apparently not very good at being either, but I kind of want to try.

---

Med school's also kind of the wrong sort of time to find out that the person can exist for whom fireworks go off when they enter a room, but whatever, no timelines.

Okay, so sometimes it happens that you meet someone and you know that by dint of their very existence they are going to break your heart, and you are going to store up every single fucking second of theirs that you can get and you are actually going to be grateful for it, because you get to see their real smiles alongside their public ones, and your friends giggling and making vomiting noises and side comments in the background are just setting the scene, and all the absurd metaphors pop songs come up with are completely accurate, only you don't really want to be thinking about metaphors. And maybe one day you'll look up to the sound of your screen door being yanked open from where it sticks to your floor and they'll step in, drenched in sweat and looking both like a mess and the treble after six trophyless years, and there won't be fireworks; and you're not sure if your greatest fear is that day coming around, or that it never will.

---

I should be talking about cadavers. I should be talking about the fact that it makes me ridiculously happy that they're blessed before dissection starts, because- I am paraphrasing a professor here- they are our first patients and our best teachers and you show them respect, dammit. I should be talking about how I was never really interested in medicine or in anatomy, but I can start skinning a cadaver, with all the effort that entails- and it's a lot of effort, bladework and formalin resistance and the right mix of cautiousness and impulse- and I understand the fascination with the complicated slobbery intricate shambling machine that is the human body. I am, I guess, but I am not sure I can do justice to the way you have to dance around the skin of the fingers because they're dessicated by the time you get to them and you don't want to take out any muscle, or to the feel of cutting through and pulling apart muscles and thinking, Hey, this is me.

"The Jurassic Park." (Polido, 2009)

So the Histo5 exam made me sick. Well, not really. Results say it's amoeba, but I harbor the personal belief that it's the combination of the life and works of Hippocrates, Herophilus, Erasistratus (not a cloud), and Guy de Chauliac, 18 push-ups, and writing (2^(n^2-4n+4))/(2^(n^2-4n+4)) = 0, all in one week.

That being said, the Histo5 exam wasn't so bad. I am clearly still sick, because saying that the Histo5 exam wasn't so bad without adding that I didn't take the objective exam is tantamount to suicide and is either a sign of mental deterioration, or a sign that I won't be going to school for long enough for any incidental readers to forget I said it.

On the bright side, we saw our first cadavers (I mean the first cadavers that didn't belong to people we used to know), but then again the Department of Anatomy not having cadavers would be quite a surprise. Formalin reeks, and the fact that we're supposed to be grateful the reek is not that of decomposing cadaver makes me wonder if not having a sense of smell can be an advantage, in this profession.