Weapon of Choice

It’s mid-afternoon, and I’ve just had a bath to wash off the clingy smell of formalin. The major drama of my day was getting through two major exams on the anatomy and physiology of the thorax. During the course of the day, I began to acknowledge that I may in fact be mildly obsessive-compulsive.

Our exams were multiple-choice, and we had standardized answer sheets with little circles you had to shade completely. I had to fill in more than three hundred of these circles in the span of a few hours - until now, there’s still a dull pain on the tip of my left index finger. I tried my best to do the shading as quickly as I could, but a part of me just would not leave the circles alone until the blue ink from my pen left an almost black tinge on the paper.

After the lab exam, the answers were posted outside, and I was a bit weirded out by some of the items. There was a xiphoid that turned out to be a manubrium, a nipple that was identified as a lactiferous duct, and other anomalies. Unfortunately for me, I was unable to correctly identify the segmental bronchi from lungs that had the consistency of shredded coconut. Also, I apparently have to brush up on my basic counting skills - I mistook a sixth posterior rib for a fifth.

All throughout the lab exam, especially during the numerous rest stations, random songs kept popping into my head, like some automatic intracranial playlist. The last one I remember was a cover by Keane of U2’s With or Without You, which I think is pretty good.

On the elevator the other day, I was assaulted by a scent I hadn’t encountered in a while - sampaguita. It called up vague memories from my childhood, mostly warm, comforting, and happy. My life was simple then.

I recently watched a program on the discovery channel about murderous women who killed for money. Their weapon of choice was arsenic (except for a Norwegian woman who used strychnine, which I think was a more sadistic option since strychnine causes uncontrollable and painful siezures, with the subject remaining conscious throughout), and their method of obtaining their money was insurance. Their strategy was simple: they killed off insured family members one by one - husbands, sons, daughters-in-law - and claimed the benefits. There were variations, but that’s the basic idea. Of course, people got suspicious and found them out in the end. I wonder what went on in their minds - how they could have been stupid enough to think they could get away with what they did.

I wonder how, at the end of the lab exam, I could have been completely concerned about myself - how well I did, why I made such a mistake - when just minutes before I was among the dissected remains of people who actually used to be alive, reduced to such states for the sake of something abstract and unfathomable.