Eau de rotten Rottweiler

I have smelled like death all day.

It is not a good start to my week.

This morning I started Small Animal Surgical Anatomy (SAA). In contrast to last week's pig lab, this week's procedures are all practiced on cadavers.

Fresh cadavers.

Well, "fresh" in the sense that I mean "unembalmed." Not "fresh" as in "lack-of-stinkyness" or even "recently dead."

Although I did read the syllabus section on what to bring and wear to this morning's lab, I gravely underestimated the horribleness I was going to face.

Today we practiced spays and cystotomies on our cadavers. The recommendation was to select a shorthaired dog, for ease of seeing the structures we were looking for under the skin with only minimal clipping.

My partner and I were among the last students into the dissection room. So, unfortunately, we ended up with the last shorthaired dog: an 80-lb or so female Rottweiler.

I knew the day could only go uphill when, as the two of us (both short in stature) struggled to carry this uncooperative beast of a canine over to our "surgery" table, giant strands and globs of bloody froth from the dog's mouth and nose were flung all over my lab smock and unprotected jeans.

Ahhhh... nothing quite like the feeling of cold goo from a dead dog soaking through your pants and making itself at home on your skin.

If you thought that was bad, then be glad you weren't there for the rest of the lab.

Suffice it to say, when an animal dies, one of the first parts of it to decompose is the GI tract. Obviously, our GI tracts are full of nice friendly bacteria that, in life, help us digest our food into bits that we can absorb and use in our bodies. After death, however, those same bacteria go wild breaking down all the tissue they can get their grubby little non-existent hands on (anthropomorphize much?).

So when the 22 students nearly simultaneously cut open 11 rotting abdomens, the ensuing stench was truly almost vomit-inducing.

As I spent the next several hours with my hands almost elbow-deep in this dead dog's frigid, soggy, slimy, stinky abdomen, I kept thinking to myself over and over: "I want last week's pigs again!"

Here's the bright side: we sutured up the abdomens at the end of the morning, and tomorrow we're just working on chests (should be less offensive, odor-wise), with a brief entrance back into the abdomen at the end of lab to practice gastropexies. After our pexy, we get to eviscerate both the thoracic and abdominal cavities, and use the limbs for orthopedic surgery practice on Wed, Thurs, & Fri.

Don't you wish you were in vet school?