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Humanoid Health and First Aid, Wednesday, Period 1

The classroom today had been rearranged, the desks all removed and replaced with four large, suspciously draped tables. Cristina stood at the one in front, wearing her old scrubs, a face mask pulled down around her neck.

"I got bored," she said. "So we're doing an anatomy lesson."

Hurray?

"The single most important thing in all of modern medicine is being able to practice on actual tissue. You can put bandaids on people all day, but you won't truly appreciate the complex majesty of the human body until you've actually gotten to see all its parts up close and personal. Unfortunately, the school board nixed my idea of sourcing actual cadavers for high school students to work on, but hey. This place is basically the next best thing, right?" She looked much too pleased by this whole scenario. "So today you're going to pair off and do some dissection. We don't have anywhere near enough time to cover the whole human body properly — that takes years, not hours — so each pair is going to get one organ from the thoracic cavity to locate and identify by the end of class. So, uhhhh. You and you get corpse number one, you two are on corpse number two, and you two get corpse number three. There are spare scrubs, gowns, gloves and face masks at each table. Not that you can catch or spread anything from holograms, but you can all play dress up and at least feel like real doctors while you're at it. I'll walk you through cracking the chest, and then you all can go nuts." She pulled her face mask up and held a scalpel in her gloved hand. "Now, gown-up and let's have some fun, shall we?"

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"This is going to be so, so great," Paris said, practically bouncing about getting to do this.

"Big fan of cracking open cadavers?" Norman was grinning a little at her enthusiasm, honestly. It wasn't like the body bothered him at all. "Good, that means neither of us is likely to be squeamish, here."

"I'm thinking of going pre-med next year at Harvard," Paris said, "and if I faint and cry now Dr. Yang won't write me a recommendation letter."

[YOU SAW NOTHING]

"I mean, that makes sense," Norman admitted, looking thoughtfully at the body. "Especially since these ones aren't technically even real. And even if they were, it isn't like we can make them more dead."

He'd come by the title 'Gothy Spice' honestly.

[WHAT A STRONG JAWLINE YOU HAVE, PARIS.]

"Nothing we can really do to screw this up," Paris agreed, suiting up. "So, do you know where the thymus is?"

"Nope," Norman replied, shrugging a shoulder and reaching for his own gear. "The trachea's easy, and I can kind of figure out a ballpark guess for the thoracic duct, but I have no idea where to start looking for the thymus."

He paused.

"I wonder if we have time to find all three before class ends."

This poor, poor holo-corpse.

"I bet we can," Paris said, pulling up a picture on Wikipedia like the Nerdy Spice she was. "Oooh, human sweetbreads!" she said, grinning and holding out the phone screen.

"Ooooh, that's what that one's called." Said like the creepy little Gothy that he was. Because of course he wondered about some of the stuff he saw just hanging out of horribly mangled dead people as they floated by. "So, that one would be... kind of in front of the heart and behind the sternum."

Norman. Norman, sometimes it was less creepy to play stupid about your weirdly precise anatomical knowledge. Not knowing what this stuff was called somehow made it creepier.

"Exactly," Paris said, just happy to have a partner who she didn't need to drag along to keep up with her.

Norman made sure his gloves were on right, and then leaned over the body to look it over again. And then glanced back at Paris.

"So I guess we follow Dr. Yang's instructions on how to crack this open," seriously, Norman, stop talking about the cadaver like it was a big meaty walnut, "and then see if we can find it before moving on to the other two things we're looking for."

"I'm a huge fan of extra credit," Paris agreed, pulling her mask up over her nose.

Nerrrrrrd.

"And I really just want to understand what's going on in there," Norman decided. "So, do you want the cutting," he gestured to a scalpel, "since you're the one who wants to get into pre-med?"

Whereas he was accidentally running a magic shop and mostly just trying to pretend the last few days hadn't happened, and that was his current life plan in its entirety.

"Oooh, yes please," Paris said a tad too enthusiastically, "and you stand there and try not to go to jail again, okay?"

"I'm pretty sure I can manage that," Norman sighed, kind of just resigned to never, ever living Monday down. "If you need me to hold anything or throw some elbow grease in, let me know."

"Oh, I will," Paris said, "but for the moment, just hand me the scalpel?"

"Yeah, sure," Norman muttered, passing it her way.

And, in spite of the fact that he wasn't the sort of person to actually make it into a problem, kind of marvelling at the guts it took to be that blunt with somebody you were asking for sharp objects from.

Paris Geller: human bulldozer.

Watching Cristina's presentation carefully, Paris followed along exactly, grunting a little at how much effort it really took to crack open a human chest.

And Norman was right there on standby, getting the sneaking suspicion that Miss Pre-Pre-Med was probably not actually going to let him have a hand in anything more exciting than putting discarded body parts somewhere out of the way while she bulldozed her way through some fake dead guy.

Norman was a wise, wise man!

Paris peeked into the chest cavity. "This is cool! Come look."

Norman shrugged and leaned in to take a look for himself.

"Oh, hey," he said, leaning in to take a look for himself. "That's the one we're looking for there, right? It's always kind of weird seeing this stuff up close. It's never anything like movies make you think it should be like, you know?"

Actually, Norman, most high school kids would not be in a position to know that.

"Yeah, this is much messier," Paris said. "I love this room for that. Makes it real without being real, y'know?"

"Yeah," Norman agreed, smiling a little as he leaned in for a better look. "Nobody actually had to die for this to happen. And if we mess up, we can probably just get a do-over, no guilt. We can even just kind of go exploring in there if we have the time. It's neat. I've never seen anything like the stuff Dr. Yang's been pulling out for this class."

Well, that wsn't true. He'd seen plenty of the scenarios. Just... real. Generally with people who were already dead.

"Almost makes up for the squirrel spying, the random animal transformations, and whatever Beaker is," Paris said.

"Almost," Norman replied, shaking his head. "It's going to take a lot more than this to make up for the animal transformation thing right now, though."

He was carrying a mighty grudge over that one at the moment, yes.

"It led to your life of crime, right?" Paris said, squinting to be sure she cut out the correct organ.

"Yeaaaah," Norman sighed. "Lesson learned. Next time the island turns me into a crab, I'll just lock myself in my room and not come out until I turn back again."

He leaned in, stuck his hand into the chest, and held another organ out of the way to give her a clearer path for the scalpel.

"Thanks for that," Paris said, slicing carefully to avoid Norman's fingers.

Don't say she never did anything nice! You have all of your fingers.

Eh, it was the danger shop. Norman's fingers would've been fine if she'd gone out of her way to stab each one of them.

"You're welcome," he replied easily. "Need anything eese in there nudged around, just let me know."

That was very useful, Norman, thank you.

Edited 2018-10-26 03:13 (UTC)

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Humanoid Health and First Aid, Wednesday, Period 1

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