So I was minding my own business, grilling my biology professor on how to make my grandma’s foot arthritis better (we are studying in depth, human anatomy) when he told me we would have to put our discussion on hold because we had spent ten minutes already of class time in his office discussing it. He has been teaching us about cartilage and stuff and telling us about how that floppy stuff on a roosters head can be injected and provide a kind of artificial cartilage and is really helpful. He said his wife used it on her fake knee but he didn’t know much about arthritis and said he’d look into it and other options. I know my grandma is in tremendous pain because of the arthritis in her feet though she never complains about it. Every now and then she’ll cheerfully announce that she’s sore but I can tell just from looking at her toes and feet and that she told me it was “bone on bone” that she’s in pain. When I was a young teenager, I would ask god to give me some of her pain since I was younger and could handle it better. Since religion didn’t work, I’m moving on the most logical answer: modern science. Anyway, Professors office is quite a way from the classroom so I used this opportunity to walk with him (or jog beside him to keep up because he’s about 6’7) and he promised me that we could probably find something outside of pain meds that would be able to provide her some comfort. We went into class and I plopped down. At the end of class he told us we’d be dissecting embryonic pigs. I did not feel horrified by this news. I find baby pigs utterly adorable and love them with all my heart, which pretty much everyone knows already. I did not figure though, I’d have problems slicing up an embryo pig. We tromped to lap and I cheered to myself that my horribly annoying lab partner wasn’t there. She’s always telling me what a “girly girl” I am and that I would never survive in the “country” even though she’s from Dallas and I’m from a farm. I have no idea why she does this considering my class is at eight in the morning and I always show up in jeans, a t-shirt, pony tail, and no makeup whatsoever. I think it has something to do with the fact that she tries to mingle with all the boys, telling them what a tomboy she is, while pretending to talk sports. She also likes to point out that I’m a girly girl because unlike her, I don’t consider it cool to carry around the professor’s dead crap before he’s pickled it. I am 100% positive she does this because she thinks people admire her for it when in reality, we all think she’s a gross weirdo. Whatever. I was just happy I wouldn’t have to deal with her dumb insults about my gender. The professor told us not to touch anything before he demonstrated the most important parts, reached into a huge bucket, and held up an actual sized baby pig from the hind legs. Its tongue was hanging out and it had fur. Involuntarily, I screamed, “Jesus effing Christ! (I pronounced this “hay-suess” Christ)
Professor looked over to me and said, “I have already told you using God’s name in vain in another language and disguising the curse word isn’t any less offensive. What’s your problem?”
I was kind of embarrassed, though the people in the class are pretty much now all my friends. He just looked at me, dangling the poor dead baby pig and I watched as juices slopped down from it onto the counter.
“You said it was an embryonic baby pig, not an actual baby pig,” I said, mortified to feel tears spring into my eyes.
“These pigs were removed from the pregnant mother a couple of days before they were due so she could go to the slaughter house. They remove the babies and sell them to educational institutions and research. Notice the umbilical cord is still attached.”
He demonstrated the umbilical cord by flicking it a few times. “This is NOT the penis,” he said, “I’ve had students ask that. Now what you’re going to do when you get your pig is take two of these heavy duty rubber bands and tie him down like this.” He struggled, tying each arm and foot to each corner of the rectangular dissection platter so that in the end, the baby pig’s limbs were all spread out and tied down. When he showed the class the spread eagle baby pig, each limb tied to a different corner, a girl ran to the trashcan and hurled.
“Very common,” Professor said as she tried to get the trashcan out the door while still hurling. A nice boy went to assist her, “if you need to vomit, do so the way she’s doing, NOT on the floor and NOT on the specimen.”
One girl asked what would happen if we did puke on the specimen which was what I was going to ask because I was pretty sure I could manage to do that.
“If you ruin your pig in any way, you fail the lab,” he said, “you only get one so don’t screw it up. This is a small class and I’ll be here to help you so don’t go crazy on this thing. Take your time and if you have any questions, ask before you start hacking at it.” He started plopping dead pigs on the dissection platters along with the rubber bands.
“These are very heavy duty rubber bands,” he said, popping a few at his stuffed deer head across the room. We watched them smack into it with full force. I envisioned him on the news with the anchor saying, “A well respected college professor is facing trouble after popping a heavy duty rubber band at a stuffed deer head and accidentally injuring his favorite female student, Jessica Hallford. The injury was very gruesome, but after talking with the girl’s grandfather, our journalists found that she was full of horseshit, which is why the rubber band was able to go right through her.”
“Do not accidentally pop yourself in the face with these when you’re positioning your pig or it will hurt,” he said, jerking me out of my thoughts.
When I held out my tray he plopped down my baby pig and I was startled by the weight. I told him so.
“These are about four to six pounds,” he said. I noticed that my pig’s mouth was wide open and his tongue was sticking straight up. He had little patches of gray and black and adorable baby pig hairs on the top of his head. I went back to my table. There was one pig for each set of partners but my annoying partner had not showed up so I was flying solo. The thought of slicing into this poor baby pig was just too much. I love baby pigs. I love all things tiny and small and cute and willing to cuddle with me. I had to find a way to get out of it. I could pretend to have a heart attack. I could claim to have a health issue when it came to pigs. I could say I practiced a religion that thought pigs were sacred. But I remembered my very faltering biology grade and realized I would have to just do it. Even one screw up the rest of the semester will force me to re-take the class. I peered down at the baby pig and wanted to cuddle him. Since he was one, dead, two, injected with preservatives, and three, cuddling a dead baby pig would be weird, I resisted. I was just going to have to pretend he was a disgusting bird. I would have no issue hacking into a duck or something. That wasn’t going to work. This adorable pig looked nothing like a duck. I went through my brain, trying to figure out how I was going to cope with this and then an idea came to me. I am madly in love with Dr. House. I would pretend I was performing a special operation just for him, and if it was successful, I would be a millionaire doctor AND get to do dirty things to House because he would be so impressed with my brilliance. Professor demonstrated what we should do first. My stomach was churning and freaking out and I was trying to pump myself up to start pretending I was a surgeon for house. Whatever it takes. So I got to work. I got my scalpel and started but couldn’t quit looking at the pig’s face. I had somehow, in my dumb brain, named him Joshua and I just couldn’t stand looking at his little pig face. I left the table, grabbed a paper towel, and taped it over his face. Much better. I got to work slicing him from the bottom of his chin to his butt-hole. Professor chuckled at what I had done and showed me how to slice around his little baby pig penis so I didn’t detach it. Once I couldn’t see his face and his little pig body was open and I was clearing out the tissue from his internal organs, things got better. I looked in my lab book and saw how to cut his ribs out to better see the organs. I got to work, following closely so as not to harm any of the important vessels or arteries, and once my pig was totally cleaned out, I made a startling discovery: his insides appeared to be pretty identical to human internal organs. I went to the back of the lab and grabbed Pat, the unisex dummy that has every single organ of a human that you can take out and put back together. I sat Pat on the desk next to Joshua and started taking out her parts with my ungloved clean hand, and comparing her with Joshua’s organs. It was incredible. I did this for quite a while, and Professor came up to me and asked what I was doing. I told him and he was thrilled to let me know that pigs are, in fact, nearly identical in organs and placement as humans.
“You weren’t supposed to go this far without me demonstrating it first but this is actually a very good, clean dissection.” He stopped everyone to come examine Joshua as an example. I looked, wide eyed as he showed us various organs and then showed us the same organs on Pat. I demanded to know if the pig had an appendix and he said that a pig has something that functions like his appendix but it is used for holding bacteria and digesting vegetables.
“And ours evolved from this thing to what it is now? Useless?”
“Correct,” he said, and went on showing us stuff. Everyone got back to work and I started labeling the very visible parts of the pig in my lab book. I heard the professor freaking out because someone had totally removed the lungs with tweezers and had ruined them beyond recognition.
“How does this resemble tissue?” he demanded, “these are lungs. Class, if any of you ever need surgery, do not ask this girl.”
I was busy trying to locate the organs behind all of the intestines, which means you pretty much have to get fingers deep into them and mess around. I was horrified when something squirted out.
“You need to cut more from the fat around the stomach,” professor said, “then you won’t get squirted and you’ll have more room to dig around.”
While I was trying to figure out the best course of action to take so I wouldn’t puncture anything, my annoying lab partner showed up. She moved Pat to the back of the lab which annoyed me because I wasn’t done with him/her yet and asked what I was doing. I gave her an overview and told her we needed to remove the fat from around the stomach. I gave her my scalpel and told her she could do it since I had done all of it so far. She has always told me how much she loves dissecting things and made fun of me when I gagged when she unnecessarily pulled out all of the intestines from our roundworm weeks before and twirled them on her tweezers. I was a little annoyed because I wanted to do it but knew it wasn’t fair to hog the entire pig (no pun intended bwahaha) when she hadn’t even gotten to participate. I gave her the scalpel and she said, “no, you can do it. We did these in ninth grade so I’ve already done it.”
“Ummm,” I said, “OK, I just thought you’d like to do it since you like this stuff so much.”
Professor had overheard her and said, “which high school did you go to?”
She told him and he looked at her and said, “I actually taught at that high school about the time you went. What are you twenty, twenty one? We never dissected pigs. Not even seniors, most certainly not freshman. Get to work and don’t walk into my lab halfway through after missing all of class again.”
I handed her the scalpel and she procrastinated by peeling the tape off the paper towel and exposing Joshua’s face. I was horrified to see his face with his maimed little body right below it.
“Put that back,” I said, “and hurry up so we can finish. We still need to locate the kidneys and peel that plastic like stuff off of them.”
“Awww, look at what a cute little face she has,” she cooed and made little baby noises at it and told it how adorable it was.
“You’re an idiot,” I told her, “first of all, it’s a boy. Second of all, put that back.” She taped it back, and asked for the fiftieth time what the instructions were. I told her, patiently because I was assuming she was being a big fat liar about ever having done this before and I didn’t want her to screw it up. She just stared at it and said, “Look, I’ve really done this. Why don’t you try?”
“Will you just do it so we can continue?” I asked her and then noticed her face. She was horrified by the thought of cutting at this pig. I realized that her big tough girl act wasn’t in place just to annoy me; it was a defense mechanism for bad self esteem. Being a jerk to me was projection. She might not have an issue being gross with worms and bugs, but apparently this was just too much for her. I took the scalpel from her and showed her on one side how to do it since Professor had already explained to me what to do.
“Hey, it’s not too bad,” I said, “I covered his face. It’s actually interesting once you get into it. You try on your side.”
I handed her the scalpel again and she placed it on the fatty part of the pig’s belly and I noticed her hand was trembling. I saw she was trying not to cry and realized it wasn’t only dissecting the pig that was bothering her, it was how embarrassed she probably was that her front was kind of losing credibility and that the “girly girl” wasn’t bothered by maiming the pig (anymore) and she was. I looked around to make sure Professor wasn’t lurking anywhere around and said, “You know what? I changed my mind. You’ve already done it and I haven’t. Let me finish.”
I figured there was no harm in actually doing all the cutting as long as she was learning what the organs were and where they were. That was the lesson. I finished cutting away the fat and told her to hold back the intestines with some device made to do things like that so that I could locate the kidneys.
“You said you wanted to do it,” she said.
“Well, I can’t very well hold back all of that stuff and root around for other organs on account of only having two hands and needing them both to locate the kidneys.”
I pried the intestines all back and told her to hold the instrument. She did for about two seconds before she let go and said she had to go to the bathroom. How annoying. I rooted around and managed to do what I needed to do and when she came back, I showed her where everything was. I came across a few parts I couldn’t identify and Professor helped me figure it out. The entire lab, my partner didn’t once participate but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I decided not to make any shitty comments about “who’s the girly girl now?” I just pretended like I didn’t notice. After lab was over, we were instructed to un-tie our pigs, put them in a labeled plastic bag, and clean up. My lab partner was kind enough to hold the bag open while I dumped my pig in there, head first. She labeled everything and cleaned everything up, while I examined Pat some more. I put his/her boobs back on as well as his/her penis just to be safe. Professor rolled his eyes at me as he walked by. Once we were all seated again, he announced this lab would continue for the rest of the semester and we’d end up cutting into the pig’s brain, taking out its jaw, and looking at its face muscles. Poor Joshua. As we went to leave, my annoying lab partner caught up to me and said, “I’ve already done all that before so it wouldn’t be fair for you to not do it this time.” This irritated me. I also was horribly disturbed about having to cut into this pig’s face and it really wasn’t fair for me to do the entire thing. I had no problem saving her when she just kind of walked into the situation but now she had fair warning.
“I’ll do the right side and you’ll do the left. You’re not going to pawn everything off on me just because this freaks you out when you know it freaks me out too. Deal with it.”
“I’ve already done it,” she said, “you were cool with it earlier.”
“Then you can do it again and I think we can both agree that that’s fair. See you next week.”
And then surprisingly, I went and got a bunch of soft tacos from Taco Bell and inhaled them on my way home, after spending over an hour butchering up a tiny baby pig. Next week I destroy its adorable baby pig face. I am not looking forward to this.
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