Guilt

I am a frog murderer. I killed two frogs two weeks ago I think. And the full realization came to me only now, after the recent onslaught of exams that occupied me the past few days. I was supposed to do a decerebration procedure, which involved cutting up the top side of a live frog's head and pulling out the brain. All that to assess what aspects of the frog's motor responses are controlled by which parts of its central nervous system. I would have objected, too, being the compassionate creature that I am, but the lab instructor said, "Oh, the operation is absolutely painless to the frog. Nothing to worry about." (not the exact words, of course, but a close approximation) and so I complied.



There were a few complications to the whole thing. First, my specimen was not exactly a frog. It was a toad. Which meant it was big and its skin was thick and bumpy. Second, I was supposed to cut through the maxillary (jaw) bone and parts of the skull, and all I had were crappy scissors from a human dissecting set that were clearly not made to cut through bone, as I was made painfully aware of the moment I began. Again, the lab instructor said, "Oh, I'm sure those scissors will do. You go right ahead." Third, the instructor was pretty vague about how to go about the whole thing. She merely told me to cut behind the eyes and take off the head and the brain with it. Not exactly illuminating.




There's more. The lab was in its usual state of sweltering heat, I was sweating like crazy, and moments after I began my first attempt my phone started vibrating in my pants pocket and just kept on going (it was a phone call, never mind who it was), which is something you never want to happen to you while dissecting a toad, particularly if you're a compassionate creature like myself.




The 'frog', too, was not behaving like it should have been. The chloroform was supposed to have sedated it and kept the whole thing painless, but unfortunately it didn't do its job as well as it should have. The 'frog' was a good actor though. After we patiently held out a chloroform-soaked cotton ball in front of its nose for some time, it appeared limp and relaxed. But when I made the move to begin cutting it up, it squirmed around and refused to keep still. Strange. Like it had somehow sensed its own death. Anyway, we had to re-apply the chloroform a couple more times until I got fed up and decided to finally get on with it.




It took me a while to cut through the jaw bone. By that time, there was yellowish-white goo that had oozed through both sides of its upper back, which I later learned was poison. Perfect. Also, a lot of blood was spewing from the cut I made, and it didn't show signs of stopping. I didn't even get to start on the more solid bones of the skull when we realized our 'frog' was dead.




Her name was Lucy, by the way.




It turned out that we cut in the wrong place - behind the exposed tympanic membrane (eardrum to laymen) when the cut was supposed to be in between the eyes and the eardrum. Well, it wasn't exactly a blunder. After all, we did cut behind the eyes like we were told.




So we decided to try again. This time with another live toad we left nameless. I was seriously doubting my scissors' capacity to do the job, but I thought maybe the right cut would make the difference. Apparently it didn't. Granted, there was no marked bleeding when I cut up the jaw, and the toad still showed signs of life, but the scissors just could not cut up the thick bone on top of its head, and in the end we had to give up trying. Which left the nameless toad with a fractured jaw and (I assume) a large amount of pain. We pithed the toad, which is just a nice way of saying we killed it by poking at and in the process destroying its brain and spinal cord. And we wrapped it up in an old newspaper with Lucy and threw it in a trash bin.




And now I'm tormented by all the ifs and could haves and I still think I could have prevented the senseless waste of amphibian life if I had just prodded for clearer instructions from the instructor or used better instruments (a scalpel, maybe, or anything else sharp) or whatever else I could've done to change the outcome of things. But it's no use. I guess my conscience will never rest.