“When you go in, it’s like an adventure,” says Danny Najera, an Oklahoma City graduate student in biology.
Najera, a GTA for a biology department dissection laboratory, guides students and scalpels through the innards of the university’s cadavers, which are stored on the first floor of Haworth Hall. He says the university has five specimens at any given time, all borrowed from the University of Kansas Medical Center.
He says the first thing you have to do is get over the smell—a bitter, rotting fruit-like odor. The perfume comes from preservatives, not the body itself.
“It makes your nose think bad things,” he says.
Najera’s students are always surprised by the massive amounts of fat found on bodies, slim or thick. He says it’s everywhere; between muscles and skin, organs, and even between the eye socket and eyeball.
“You feel like you’re spending an hour and a half digging through fat,” he says.
But before you get too far into your journey of anatomic discovery, you have to dry the body out.
“Initially, when you go in, it’s juicy everywhere.”
After drying the body in a process that includes sopping up body liquid with paper towels, the body assumes the appearance of beef jerky and is ready for examination. Najera says you find all kinds of surprises inside, including branches of arteries that aren’t found in textbooks, stomach staples and livers ranging from the size of golf balls to footballs. He’s held human brains and seen damaged kidneys covered in blisters.
Some parts are easier to cut through than others.
“Even a scalpel has problems going through the tendons,” he says. “It’s almost like you need a saw.”
Najera says he’s never had a student vomit or pass out while dissecting a body, but notes that everyone experiences some discomfort at first.
“It’s a test. No one really knows what their reaction will be like.”
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