Second day at work

There's something about the smell of shit in a dead man's open abdominal cavity that really makes you concentrate. You can tie shut the colon before you cut it out, but once a few microscopic pieces of fecal matter make it to your olfactory cells, the room takes on the distinctive odor of death, and you seem to put aside the myriad nagging worries of the outside world. Gone from your mind are the decisions of the day -- which flavored coffee will fuel our next foray into the abyss (pistachio ice cream is too unorthodox, and strangely enough, chocolate raspberry smells like fruit hooka). Wiped from your thoughts are the trivial and fantastical, the incessant worry that your shirt is bunched up in an unflattering way, the mental checklist of things to do after you get home (1. SHOWER, 2. SHOWER), the attempts to imagine what a fellow intern looks like under her scrubs (a purely hypothetical situation -- I'll have you know that the air of decay belied, with the starkest contrast, the pureness of my thoughts).

This is the sometime hideaway of a pathologist's assistant, who is confined for hours to a dungeon of a room in the recesses of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, past an unmarked door with a warning sign that reads like an understated threat -- NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT. The worst part was before the first cut was made, when there was still ample time to contemplate the incomprehensible, the truly troublesome, the existential questions posed by ourselves to ourselves. Is this chunk of meat, organs, skin, this bag of once-functional biochemical machinery, still a man? What is different about him now, what has he lost, that he possessed a day before that time labeled on the body bag? Did he even change at all?

That, and who he was, but now that is answered, but I deleted the link that was here originally because I would have been sued for violating patient-doctor confidentiality.