Making the Cut

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Today I think to myself: Yes. Why not? Cut your own arm off at the shoulder. It wouldn’t be the first limb you’ve amputated.

My fetal pig. I resisted naming him. He was delivered unceremoniously on the lab bench in front of me, his pale eyelashes pressed against his cheeks by the plastic that vacuum-packed him in formaldehyde. I was pleased he was so plump. He must have been close to term. Other pigs in the room were just skin and bones, translucent and ghostly. Mine was pink, with a handsome black band across his back, a black spot on his nose and another on one ear. Poor piglet. My job was to cut him to bits. Slowly. It would take weeks.

The first cut was the hardest. Of course, we had practised on worms and fish before. The worms were so thoroughly embalmed, they had seemed more like rubber toys from the dollar store. The fish, no less preserved, sometimes came back to life, flipping out of the dissecting tray and bouncing off the stool and onto the floor, where a few more bounces recalled a trout in its death throws on a rowboat’s bottom. The worms and fish still hadn’t really prepared me for laying my piglet on his back, opening his tiny arms into a wide hug, and drawing my scalpel down his chest in a bloodless incision. But as the knife made contact – that was the hard part – my worries ended, and I bent closer and concentrated.

My fear of cutting conquered, my concern now was to do him justice. How could I make my incisions smoother, straighter, finer? Others fancied themselves butchers. Some left ragged edges and unsightly wounds on their pigs. And some even laughed as they blithely severed a vein or the vas deferens. I had to dissect my piglet, but I was determined he would otherwise remain intact.

How did it end? The pigs simply did not arrive on our benches one day. “We’re finished with them,” the lab demonstrator remarked casually. “They smell just too bad to work on anymore.” It was a blow. Not a fatal one, but a blow nonetheless. I had held his little heart in my hands to examine its ventricles and cracked his skull to reveal his brain. I had severed his arm at the shoulder and carefully peeled away the skin to expose the muscles, pulled apart muscles to expose tendons and bone. But I hadn’t finished with him.

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