Kay - Undoctored

You know what its like when youre cutting up a dead body. No, of course you dont. Its a perverse and horrific thing that should only ever be experienced by coroners and gangland criminals. Unless of course youre one of the 9,000 eighteen-year-olds who sign up to medical school in the UK every year. For them, its just what you do each Friday morning.

Wear your Underwear too. Put on the same stuff every week, then burn it at the end of the year. I imagined this was because theyd be getting sprayed with skull-water or stained by lung fragments, but it was actually around 2 per cent less disgusting than that it was the stench.

The smell of the dissection room permeates deep into every single fibre of cotton or polyester and never, ever leaves. It hits you afresh whenever youre within 100 metres of the place: a smell Ive never experienced since and one that isnt likely to trouble the parfumiers at Jo Malone any time soon. Its a weird blend of time-expired flesh and throat-grabbing, nose-scorching, eye-cooking industrial vinegar.

Two hundred of

Find yourselves a cadaver, bellowed our lecturer, like he was running the bingo night We each huddled around one of the dozen zip-locked corpsebags.

Do you mind if I join you? I stuttered to my cadavermates, as if I was making up a four for bridge rather than getting ready to carve up someones granddad like a Christmas turkey. Refusing to acknowledge our natural anxiety, we tried to outdo one another with how totally fine and comfortable we all felt. But And here we were, about to slice up a human being.

This sudden responsibility, a parachute-free plunge into the adult world, was quite the change for a voice-barely-broken, balls-barely-dropped teenager like accidentally shifting the car into reverse when youre doing seventy on the M1.

Time to unzip the bag then.

First the face: waxy, yellowish, almost, but not quite, inhuman. Immediately some rugby jock called Thor quipped that he looked like Bruce Williss nan and the rest of us laughed, desperate for some, any, emotional release. Then came the chest, unusually The abdomen was next, wrinkled like his organs were vacuum-packed inside. Then as the zip continued down and the PVC was peeled back, we all gasped. This man had an absolutely enormous penis.

Part of me felt like it was my turn to chip in with some light-hearted quip, just to show how totally unbothered I was by this immersive horror-movie experience. I couldnt not yet, anyway. But nor did I object to the banter; showing compassion or respect would be opening myself up to ridicule. Week one and we were learning to fold and pack away our most human feelings.

Theres really no reason to hack up a human in your first year, or indeed at all. There are better alternatives; models, 3D visualisations, even prosections, where youre shown a single autopsy by an expert rather than just barging in yourself like Teen Zorro. But instead, with freshers week hangovers still pulsating behind our eyes, we were tossed in at the deep end with a scalpel and a licence to deal in dark humour. And lets not forget, we were teenagers, and theres no way a cock of that magnitude was going to escape unremarked upon.

Does that grow after death too? snorted one of my colleagues. bleed, he reminded us our patients are dead, their hearts long past any pumping.

Although this was a new experience for all of us, as a lifelong vegetarian, I felt particularly ill-prepared. Everyone else around the table had been practising for this moment their entire lives by cutting into steaks and chicken breasts. The nearest Id come was a nice taut mozzarella. I reached for a scalpel, keen not only to prove my suitability for medicine but hopefully to show some kind of instinctive proficiency with a blade. As I stood there, the scalpels point millimetres from the skin, I learned as much about my own physiology as I did this guys anatomy. My sympathetic nervous system went into overdrive: the quickening of my pulse, the prickling secretion of sweat glands and a tremor in my muscles that showed clearly in the wobble of the blade. Then there was the sudden and wholly unexpected wave of famishing hunger that happens to be an unfortunate side effect of inhaling formaldehyde.

When it finally made contact, the scalpel slid through the skin like it was cutting wrapping paper. I guess it makes sense you never see surgeons in hospital dramas sawing away at skin like theyre doing woodwork. I pulled the scalpel down the breastbone, keeping the line as straight as I could, which was difficult with my hand still trembling like a leaf in a wind tunnel. As promised, there was no bleeding. This made the subject seem even less of a real human being, which I have to say felt like a positive: it steadied my hand and made it easier to chef him up. I reached the bottom of the sternum and swung a hard left round under the ribs. It was feeling easier I could be cutting through PlayDoh or Jesus! Suddenly, he started bleeding. Heavily. Everywhere. The bloke was alive!

Everyone gasped. Thor screamed. I was half-expecting the patient to sit bolt upright on the gurney like Frankensteins monster and demand an apology for our disrespectful remarks about his dick, when I noticed that, in actual fact, he wasnt bleeding at all. I was. Id accidentally sliced through my own thumb. I sheepishly handed over scalpel duties to the student on my left and instinctively stuffed my bleeding thumb into my mouth like the child I felt and, of course, still was. And this is how I can confirm that while the smell of formaldehyde may be an appetite stimulant, the taste of it very much isnt.

DISS-ection, as our anatomy lecturer taught us on day one: Diss as in piss, not dice as in lice.

What?! Youre a football fan?! This is the most explosive revelation in the entire book! said my friend Justin.

Sixty-three, septic knee.

Much like when dunking in a mug of tea, I find the Rich Tea takes longest to disintegrate.

or toenails. Death involves every single cell of your body permanently signing off. Its pretty final like that. Instead, what people have probably noticed is that the skin around the nails and hair dries up, retracts and retreats, making it look like you need a postmortem mani-pedi.

Now a consultant in respiratory medicine.

Now a consultant radiologist.

I wasnt sleeping well.

Id always slept very well as a doctor. I didnt sleep much and I slept in some odd places hunched over the steering wheel of my car, curled up next to a filing cabinet, leaning against a storeroom wall like a horse but I slept well. I guess my brain knew that napping opportunities were rare, so it was always able to press the shut-down button at a seconds notice, until awoken by the next bleep or buzzer.

Ever since leaving medicine a few months earlier, I found myself routinely waking up at 3 a.m. from the exact same nightmare. Standing in that labour ward operating theatre. My eyes fogging over as I realise the baby Ive been racing to save is dead, his tiny hands still and perfect. Trying and failing to place the stitches that might stop this woman from bleeding to death. The same brain that wont remember my online banking login details was quite happy to reconstruct and restage the most harrowing day of my life in microscopic detail. The moment the anaesthetist turns off the incongruously jolly radio station. The blood clotting in my shoes. Feeling my voice crack as I ask the scrub nurse for stitch after stitch after stitch after swab after swab after swab. The moment my consultant removes the patients uterus and makes this blood-soaked nightmare her only experience of childbirth. The moment when I ask the ITU doctor if shes going to be OK and he wont answer me.