One of my coworkers tells people that instead of going "Eewww, gross!" they should just stroke their non-gender-specific Beard of Knowledge and say, "Hmmm, interesting," instead, because that's what you do when you're a scientist.
Ultimately, the whole process doesn't really bother me. Mostly it's just tedious. Pulling the organs out of the freezer the day before, thawing them in the fridge overnight, setting up the trays.
These sheep did not get out much; there is an alarming amount of fat stuck to their pericardia, and I have to pull it all off, leaving the resilient, translucent membrane intact. Leechy elastic black blood clots need to be picked off and discarded. There's jiggly tissue to be removed with increasingly dull dissection scissors so the trachea is nice and clean, rings of cartilage clearly visible. And then I need to rinse warm water down the trachea, removing most of the blood, mucus, and foam so the demonstrators can cut all the way down into the bronchial tubes, laying them open so guests can see the tiny branches heading off into the spongy lungs.
The worst part isn't the feel of the pink squishiness of the lungs through my gloves. It isn't even the smell, which is bloody and sweet at times and slow and sour at others. It isn't the soft, crackly, fizzy sound that the distressing pink foam makes when it hits the sink as it spouts out of the trachea.
The worst part is the two thymuses, one on the pericardium and one at the top of the trachea. They're part of the immune system, these little loose bags of fatty, runny tissue that are mottled greyish yellow and pink and feel like they're full of gravy and bits of crushed jello and those cotton balls that give dry squeaks when you pinch them. Whenever I can, I cut them off with the scissors, but sometimes they're situated in a way that requires me to grab them and pull them off. Those days, I finish prepping because I'm a professional, and then I go sit in the office and watch videos of baby sloths and anteaters and corgis on my phone until the ghost sensation is washed out of my hands and brain.
I always finish the lungs first, because the hearts are easy.
Three hearts, cut three different ways: one is laid open and pinned, showing off the valve dividing the left atrium from the left ventricle; one is sliced like a loaf of bread from top to tip; one is cut in half and stowed in plastic baggies so guests can pass them around.
The hearts are fun, in a macabre way, because rinsing them clean means sticking the end of the tubing attached to the faucet into one opening and shooting water out another. They're like water guns that are incidentally made out of muscle.
Sometimes when I'm running warm water through a heart to finish defrosting it and to rinse away blod clots, the water will catch in an atrium or will circle through the ventricle and push the valve closed, and the whole heart jumps in my hand. I know it's not actually beating, not actually an electrical process happening; I know it's just a mechanical coincidence of water pressure and angles. But it's a reminder that this isn't just a cut of steak - this was a heart. This, just a little bit ago, beat and pumped and kept something alive.
Most days I can just prep the organs and that's it. A job completed, moving on to the next task. But some days, like when a lung is very, very small, or when a heart shudders in my hand, it's suddenly more than that. It's suddenly horrifying, or suddenly sad, or suddenly mesmerizing in the complexity of its structure and the circuitousness of its function. Sometimes, when I find a lung that's half purple with bruises, all I can think about is the cruelty of how these sheep were raised and slaughtered. Sometimes all I can think about is how amazing it is that meat found a way to survive in the universe, and that I'm meat using my meat to understand and see my relationship to other meat. Sometimes all I can think about is how much I wish I could switch off my sense of smell because this lung is going a little green.
I get caught up in moral dilemmas. The sheep are being slaughtered for food, so we might as well use their organs to help people understand what a fascinating, complex machine their own bodies are. I think animals should be treated humanely, and that when they are slaughtered it should be quick and clean and painless. I think we should all learn to do with eating a little less meat and a few more grains and vegetables. I also understand the need for specimens in order to teach about biology. I think helping people see how similar we all are on the inside, how much evolution is a fact of life, how important it is to understand the functions of their own bodies, is always worthwhile. Are there alternative ways to demonstrate all this?
Dealing with so much death in order to teach about life starts to strain the cognitive-dissonance-muscles after a while.
Hmmm, interesting.
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