Nathaniel Wiest

Nathaniel Wiest

Holding the Brain

Page 15

Holding the Brain

In my two hands I am holding the brain. Three layers of gloves separate my skin and the brain itself, but I can still feel its mildly slick outside, its firm consistency, its cool temperature. I look at it, at its rivulets and gray color. In my hands I am holding the brain.

***

It was March, 2007. That morning found me in a local restaurant with some other freshman pre-med students, all friends who lived in the dorms with me and were in the same BA/MD program as I. We were grabbing some burritos and a cup o’ Joe before our big day. We occupied one round table, and were very quiet compared to the other occupants of the restaurant, who, all in different colored scrubs, sat at a table in one corner chatting away over burritos and coffee. They were obviously medical professionals who worked at the hospital across the road, and were seemingly well acclimated to waking up at oh dark thirty. As freshman college students, we were not so acclimated to being conscious at that time in the morning. The burritos were greasy and unappealing, and as I sipped my coffee, I wondered if I was going to be queasy; I wondered if was going to throw up at my first autopsy.

You see, I was born on April 22nd, 1988 in Reno, Nevada. My father was a medical doctor, my mother a nurse. My older brother Jonathan, Jonnie for short, was three years older than me, and my only other sibling, my little brother Stephen, was born three years after me. As a middle child I grew up, as a middle child I suffered (as middle children do!), and as a middle child I watched as over the years my dad went from resident to practicing physician, my older brother from EMT-Basic to paramedic, and as my mom traveled all around the state of New Mexico as a nurse for the Medically Fragile program at UNM, helping to ensure that the families of disabled children got the medical services and rights they deserved.

For all this, I had never even once donned a pair of scrubs, though I was in a special BA/MD program with 29 other students at the University of New Mexico, complete with special classes and spots reserved for us in medical school if we kept our grades up and lives straight. However, soon this separation between me and my family would be bridged, as I would join the ranks of my father, mother, and older brother in ways that I did not anticipate.

As we walked out of the door of the restaurant to head to the autopsy that morning, little did we know that just a few hours earlier (the post-mortem examination does not specify exactly when), a man had died of alcohol poisoning while under a bridge, a man who in some respects I already knew, and whose life story was about to intersect with my own.

***

The doors slammed shut behind us as my friend shifted his car into park and we all got out. We walked around to one side of a building that projected at least four stories high and was dark and ominous in that predawn morning, and knocked on a large metal door. We stood there for a moment, and then the door opened and we all stepped inside. A swoosh of warm air brushed against me as I stepped inside, leaving the darkness behind. I had just entered the Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI).

Doctor Jeff Nine, forensic pathologist at the OMI, greeted us with a “good morning” and led us to the locker rooms. I was about to put on scrubs for the first time in my life, and as I walked into the locker room, I realized that I had no clue how to put scrubs on. Some people have an instinct for situations such as this one, and would immediately find a scrub top and bottom of appropriate size and don them, moving with an air of certainty. Not being one of these people, I immediately sought out one of my friends.

“Hey David, do you think you can help me pick out some scrubs to put on?” I asked, hoping that he would bail me out of my predicament.

“Of course!” he replied. He then proceeded to pick out a pair of scrubs for me.

Then, having selected an empty locker, I removed my tennis shoes, blue jeans, and polo shirt. I set the familiar pants and shirt into the locker before me, my feet feeling the coolness of the locker room ground through my white cotton socks. Then, I stepped into the unfamiliar scrub pants, pulled them up to my waist, and tied the strap into a bunny knot, just like the knot my parents gave me five dollars for tying successfully in their campaign to teach me to tie my shoes when I was six. The scrub pants were very comfortable, only brushing lightly and gently against my legs, not like the heavy material blue jeans that I was used to which clung to my skin. I then pulled the scrub shirt over my shoulders, and felt its cool, light fabric. The scrubs were pleasing to wear. Slipping my feet back into the tennis shoes, which were warm and molded to the shapes of my feet from long use, I turned and looked into the locker room mirror.

As I watched myself in the mirror, I could almost see my dad the doctor walking into the radiology administration office at that same moment. Since he was the first one there in the morning, he would unlock the door and flip on the lights. Then he would walk into his office, set his green lunchbox on one of the two guest chairs and set his briefcase beside his desk, which at that time held a name placard saying “Philip Wiest, M.D. Vice Chair, Department of Radiology.” Turning on his computer that day, I wonder if he thought about his son who at that same moment, in the OMI just five minutes away, was staring at his newly scrubbed self.

I exited the locker room, where in the hall directly outside the next stage of preparation was taking place.

“Man, that’s a lot of stuff to put on,” I said out loud, watching with envy as the residents expertly slipped into the multiple protective layers of autopsy gear.

“You get used to it,” said a female resident who seemed to have an inordinate amount of morning energy (though it matched her red hair) told me, flashing me a bright smile.

Not feeling encouraged, I once again looked for one of my friends.

“Hey David, can you help me put on all this stuff too?” I asked, standing there in my first pair of scrubs. By this time, my dad was probably saying “hi” to the residents who were finishing holding fort for the night. Joking around with them, he would ignore the Folger’s (“tastes like piss”) coffee brewed in the large coffee maker next to one of the examination rooms and proceed to the reading room.

“Haha, sure thing Ned!” He responded, already almost fully geared.

With his help, I proceeded to blunder my way into the first pair of gloves, apron, second pair of gloves, some other protective clothing I don’t remember, third pair of gloves, breathing mask and splash guard. I’m sure almost all of this terminology is wrong, but the end result was the same. Basically, if there were airborne contagions I would be safe by my mask, and if blood containing disease splashed onto me, it would not touch skin. These technical aspects aside, I also looked like a researcher in a high risk laboratory in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) in Atlanta. In my mind, I could see myself in the CDC at that moment:

“Doctor Wiest, here are those samples you ordered from the Ebola outbreak,” the lab tech tells me, rushing into my laboratory.

“Good. It’s time to test my experimental cure.”

“Are you sure? It hasn’t been approved by the FDA yet, sir.”

I look up from the microscope I’m peering in.

“I know, but the lives of those people in the Congo can’t wait for FDA approval. We’re going ahead with my plan now.”

“Yes sir!”

“All right everyone, let’s get to it.” Doctor Nine proclaimed, bursting my momentary bubble of glory. I followed the others through the double doors and into the autopsy room.

An omnipresent rush of cool air filled the autopsy room. The whoom-whoom sound of the “state-of-the-art ventilation system,” as Dr. Nine described it, was a constant companion. The metal autopsy tables were bare and the counters on which to place organs and such were all clean and ready to go, with the exception of one autopsy table which had a small pool of blood at its drain.

“Looks like they must‘ve cleaned up in a hurry last night,” Doctor Nine said as he washed the blood out with a quick splash of water from the faucet. The blood looked the same as the black blood of rainbow trout that would flow over my fingers into the cold stream of the Brazos Mountains as I cleaned trout as a child, which in a stream of faucet water, disappeared into the dark recesses of the drain.

Doctor Nine briskly checked the rest of the autopsy tables to make sure there was no more blood, and then invited us all over to discuss the patients that would be visiting that day. We gathered around Dr. Nine as he handed us packets which had patient names and information on them. He went over them one by one, fluently interchanging between the language of medical jargon and English, so that I could sometimes only understand the definite articles and prepositional phrases of his sentences.

“Let’s do this smoothly and efficiently, and maybe we can get off even earlier than yesterday,” Doctor Nine encouraged, and the residents agreed. It was like a restaurant in which the employees had just finished getting everything ready, and had just flipped the sign on the door to OPEN. The Office of the Medical Investigator was now OPEN, and in the customers came.

Or, more accurately, in cocoons of medical bags they were quickly wheeled in through the double doors that connected the room to the outside hallway. The residents wasted no time in wheeling in the bodies, which were then lifted like bags of discount meat onto the butchers’ tables, with about as much care. I don’t remember all the items on the menu that day, though I do remember three specifically: a car crash victim, a child suicide, and a man who was found under a bridge just that morning.

And then, the bags were unzipped and the contents inside were no longer items on a menu, but sleeping human beings. Every single one of them, except for the car crash victim, could be merely sleeping.

The woman who had died in a car crash had dried black streams of blood running down her face, which was contorted into a very unhappy expression. It actually surprised me that she was dead, because she looked in very good shape compared to the mangled bodies they had shown me in driver’s school videos. Unlike in those videos, there was no accompanying gore or body parts in the bag with her. Just her and her expression, which seemed to communicate that she was anxious to get home and watch her favorite show, while the jackass stopping suddenly in front of her obviously didn’t understand this. Her expression probably soured even more as she realized that the pressure from her vehicle compressing in on her like a tin can under a shoe was very uncomfortable. Indeed, her expression communicated to me that death had found her at a very inconvenient moment, and that she would have none of it. However, death obviously does not heed the wishes of human beings, for otherwise Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte would still be sitting on their thrones.

I contemplated this while walking around, since everyone else but the other visiting students were occupied preparing the bodies, though for what, I did not yet know. The soapy sponges in the hands of the residents glided over the skin of the naked bodies the way mothers wash their infant babies in the sink, if not a little faster so as to get out even earlier than yesterday.

I walked around, proud of myself in my high tech gear (“Doctor Wiest, there is a plane waiting for you at the airport, you’re needed in Kenya immediately”) until I came upon the corner of the autopsy room which had a silver autopsy table which, unlike the other tables which had fully grown human beings on them, had naught but a small figure laying face up on it: a young boy who looked to be about thirteen years of age. The child suicide.

“Remember that the bodies are only empty shells,” my dad had told me the weekend before I came to the OMI. I had walked into the master bedroom, where he was sitting in his chair watching the television. It was evening, and I slumped into the chair next to his. Dad in the master chair, me in the other chair, vista of the Sandia Mountains radiating pink through the windows, and the local news on directly in front of us. I asked how it was seeing dead bodies for the first time.

“Remember that the bodies are only empty shells. God has taken the spirit away.” I had simply nodded my head, placing implicit trust in his words as I always had, since the days when my hair was not yet blonde, but still white, and my hands were just learning how to correctly press down piano keys and cut open rainbow trout to clean out the guts.

I still found comfort in his words, standing there in the autopsy room of the OMI, whoom-whoom of the ventilation overhead, small talk at the other tables, my hands behind my back in an unconsciously defensive grip as I looked on the dried tear stains running down from the eyes of child suicide. The tear stains reflected the light in a way that, while you could still see the skin underneath them, was somehow pure in the way that only children can be pure. In a white circle around his neck was the imprint of a belt.

His father had killed himself a month earlier.

As for the mere child laying in front of me, his brother found him hanging in his room.

Strangely, I did not stand there and ponder the young boy like you would expect a character in a play to do. I did not try and imagine the terrible feelings that must have overcome him after his father’s suicide, and I did not shed a tear while wondering how his brother and mother were taking these losses. Although, it has never failed to give me a sinking feeling in my chest to imagine the child’s brother walking in on him hanging from his bunk bed.