Chrissie DyBuncio is a Filipina-American writer and former physician. Her essay “Gross Anatomy” appears in our Fall 2022 issue.
The experience of taking another body apart is a rite of passage in medical school. For me, it was the task that I thought stood at the threshold between the version of myself before becoming a doctor and the one after.
I knew I could never be the same person after I had peeled back skin or disarticulated bone; I just didn’t know what that person would look like. My piece “Gross Anatomy” (Intima, Fall 2022) and Jennifer Stella’s poem “Letter to a 93-year-old Cadaver who Died from Multiple Causes” (Intima, Spring 2014) both grapple with the cognitive dissonance that many medical students experience during and after dissection. In examining her piece with relation to mine, I thought to focus on its anatomy, as only seemed appropriate!
The fourth stanza of the poem is structured as such:
Reflecting your thoracic cage—not my
saw to your manubrium, not
my cut haphazard-sliced your
lung. Dense, dark. With cartilage
compressed like tears.
The sentences in this stanza are enjambed in such a way that the first word of each line creates a sentiment of its own: Reflecting/saw/my/lung/compressed. This feeling hovers like a ghost over the main action of the scene. “Saw” is both the physical saw used to cut through the cadaver’s chest as well as the past tense of the verb “to see.” The word “my” functions as an intersection between a thing that the narrator inflicts upon the cadaver (“my cut”) and that which is inflicted back upon the narrator by making such a cut (“my lung, compressed”). This stanza demonstrates how the effects of dissection immediately ricochet back onto the dissector. It is impossible to walk away unscathed. In fact, it is intrinsic—enjambed—within the act of dissection that one feels one’s own body in the process. This feeling of physical empathy that occurs when encountering a cadaver is one I attempted to articulate in a different form in my own essay.
Feeling one’s own body while feeling another’s make these anatomies both conjoined and distinct from one another. This is the seed of the cognitive dissonance so many medical students feel. Dissonance is the cloud med students can all converse about but can’t quite pin down. When you know, you know. Both these pieces are attempts at articulating this feeling, if only as a salve of acknowledgment, but hopefully also to insist that the presence of dissonance is in fact evidence of our deepest ability to empathize—or said in another way: of the heart of what makes us human.
Chrissie DyBuncio is a Filipina-American writer and former physician. Her non-fiction about her time as a physician has been published in Slate. She has a memoir-in-progress about becoming and un-becoming a doctor. Reach her at chrissie@chrissiedybuncio.com. Her essay “Gross Anatomy” appears in our Fall 2022 issue.