No Where To Go

An anatomy class I took in college involved a weekly lab with three cadavers. More advanced classes actually dissected them. We just studied them and took quizzes that required us to identify various parts of them.

I handled it pretty well until the day the lab instructor had us crowd around one of the bodies, and I ended up trapped in the middle of a bunch of students, our backs up against the wall. It was a tight fit. I was directly in front of the cadaver's abdominal cavity and the instructor started scooping up the intestines and plopping them on the cadaver's rib cage so he could show us something underneath. Waves of formaldehyde assaulted me. I suddenly felt a little woozy, and I realized that if I were to pass out, the only way I could fall was directly into the abdominal cavity.

"Mind over matter, mind over matter," I chanted silently to myself. Thankfully, I made it through without incident. But I wasn't very hungry for lunch afterward.