Dissection Essay

After unzipping our cadaver’s body bag and slicing through the industrial plastic sheath in which our school’s embalmer had wrapped him just a few weeks earlier, all I could think of was how much this man resembled Walter Matthau from “Grumpy Old Men”. So naturally, our group started calling him Walt. A month later, after progressing through Walt’s back, thorax, and abdomen, it was time to dive into the retroperitoneal space. On almost every other day I was asked to stand back and read the dissection manual. My group attributed this to my uncanny ability to rip out every significant and testable structure I laid my hands upon. However, that morning the leverage my height afforded me was utilized to crane over Walt and access his paranephric …show more content…
Although I do not speak of it often, this profoundly affected the way I approached medical school, patients, and patient care. Where I was once ungrounded, I found stability built on a foundation of compassion and understanding. Where I was once unsure, I found a certainty that only hard-earned convictions are able to generate. I realized that every missed answer, every act of laziness, every unexplored diagnosis could result in the death of someone’s best friend, partner, or child. I understood that soon the full burden of caring for someone else’s mother would fall to me. If I was going to make a difference, I knew I had to excel to the maximum of my potential and I had better do it in a field I enjoyed. The field that kept returning to the top of my list was Urology. I was drawn to this field for a variety of reasons, the least of which was my fascination with the kidney and surgery; the factor that drew me the most to Urology was the compassion, competence, skill, and positive attitude of the urologists at my home institution. After meeting them, I realized I found the field that would allow me to wake up every morning with the energy, competence, and compassion needed to give my patients what they deserve: the very