Freddie: Darling, where are you going?
Eliza : To the river.
Freddie: What for?
Eliza: To dig a hole in it.
-My Fair Lady

Dissected cow udders today. Correction, make that decomsposing cow udders. Smelled like what one would imagine the bacteria under an unhygienic sumo wrestler's flabs would smell like. They came in garbage bags from the slaughter house. You'd open the bag and find a lovely disembodied udder in a pile of gushy putrid liquid. I think it turned off a lot of the guys in my class from breasts. Heck, it turned a lot of the girls off them too.

Of course, udders were a welcome thing after last week where I was dissecting uteri, vaginas and ovaries of various species. Some of the uteri were pregnant and we got to take out the little embryos and fetuses and dissect those too. What amazes me most about cow embryos is that they essentially look like mini, palm-sized cows. It's amazing. Their hooves, ribs, hearts, eyes and scrotum were all identifiable, even though the fetus couldn't have been more than 3 months old.

I find I'm kind of resistant to blood, guts, gore, stenches and feces now. Nonetheless, dissecting ovaries and uteri reminded me of that wonderful scene from "The Devil's Advocate" where Charlize Theron dreams that there is a kid sitting in her living room playing with her blood-covered dismebodied ovaries.

Despite that, I am not as traumatised as I would be if I were performing all these dissections on human specimens. Gabriel is doing a sort of elective at the Coroner's Office in Syndey this week and every night, he tells me about the traumatic cases that enter in the doors there. Dissecting pregnant cow uteri is one thing, but cutting up some guy that hung humself and wasn't found for a few weeks is quite another. What would bother me most wouldn't be the cutting up human flesh part. Afterall, a body is a body is a body. What bothers me are the stories associated with each corpse that flows in. These are humans and one can never fear that one will wrongly anthropomorphise a human as vets are often prone to do with animals. Each person was a human being with a family, a story, and a life.

At the end of the day, it wouldn't be the images of a decomposing body lying on a steel table that would plague me. It would be the image of a person being sad enough to tie a rope to their ceiling, put their head into the noose and kick out the chair from underneath themselves. Then there's the worst part which is that they weren't even close enough to anyone to have them notice that they were missing until 3 weeks later when the neighbors finally complained about the smell.

I can't help but think that if I ever die unexpectedly, the smell of Ranger's cage after a week of not being cleaned will be enough to draw complaints from the whole building.("I'll die all alone and be eaten by wild Alsatians!")

But these are all really morbid thoughts that I'd rather not think about at the moment.
Must think of happy things. Bunnies, sunshine, flowers and minty handsoap.

Wow. That's the happiest stuff I can come up with?!! I'm screwed!

Let's try this again. Campfires, beaches, big warm fluffy blankets, Christmas, the smell of cloves and cinammon, sunlight streaming through clean windows, fuzzy ducklings, puppies, Jaws, hot water bottles, grandma's cooking, sunrise, quiet winter mornings, snowflakes, raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with- D'oh!!!

@$#@%! I give up.

Bring on the milk and cookies . . .