Toads-in-the-Hole

The day before our microbiology final we had our suturing lab. I knew what was coming; I had done my best to steel myself for the inevitable; I had made sure to eat a bland breakfast in case of catastrophe, but I was still taken aback by what I saw: 60 pigs’ feet, severed at the elbow. We were each handed one as we walked into the room and, of course, I dropped mine.

Most of my classmates think I’m a vegetarian. I’m not, I’ll happily munch on beef, chicken, fish, lamb, kittens, angels.... But when it comes time to order pizza for a lunch conference, I’m the only student who asks for cheese. Most likely all of our readers already know this, but in case we’ve garnered a huge following without realizing it, I’ll briefly explain: I don’t eat pork because I feel a kinship with pigs. And in Vermillion, South Dakota, that which comes on top of pizzas is made of pigsflesh.

So, I had to learn to suture. Being able to close a surgery is one of the great benefits I’ll enjoy during my clinical rotations next year (in a lot of places, med students are elbowed out of the way by surgical residents) and it was important to learn the rudiments in a safe environment. On a realistic model. “Why not use the cadavers?” I asked myself. We had a whole room full of them just downstairs, just lying (laying? should I use the term for the inanimate?) around, probably bored out of their skulls. The answer, of course, is that a lot of my classmates (and probably a lot of my professors) always found the cadavers distasteful and smelly. And anyway it was more convenient to use pig’s feet in the comfort of our own classroom than to put on labcoats and grungy clothes for the cadaver lab. As our instructors walked around making cruel slashes in the tissue for us to sew closed, I tried to use humor to make myself more comfortable. “W-what a beautiful sacrifice of all those Thalidomide babies to give us their flippers!” I announced to my table, to a few chuckles and a few shocked expressions. "Mutter-mutter pigeaters," I thought to myself.