Grosser Than Gross
In the old middle school joke style, set to the tune of “Yes, Oh Yes, This Happened To Me Yesterday”:
- What’s gross?
- Cadaver lab, where students learn how to do procedures on fresh frozen cadavers.
- What’s grosser than gross?
- Being the TA, and injecting fluid into the ankle joint so students can tap it easier.
- What’s grosser than that?
- Injecting too much fluid into the joint space, leaving the needle in place, and removing the syringe for some stupid reason, and then getting hit, from chin to chest, with several spurts of cadaver joint fluid.
I’m an optimist. At least it didn’t hit my mouth.
Reminds me of the time I placed a chest tube and the attending went to adjust it.
Who was the only one wearing anything over their clothes? Me.
Who got sprayed head-to-toe with pleural effusion and required a shower? My doc and his nurse.
I got squirted by a new fluid today:
Serosanguinous blister fluid from a burn.
I used to get little bits of cadaver fat on my glasses all the time — some combination of splatter and the bad habit of pushing up the bridge of my glasses with the back of my (fat-covered) hand.
What is gross? We had an anatomy professor who never wore gloves when he was helping us dissect our cadavers. He was always chewing on an unlit cigar, and when he would stop at a table to help the quartet of students needing help, he would lay his cigar on the side of the table, and when he was done assisting the students, he would pick up the cigar and put it back in his mouth. None of us could understand how he could do this. This was in 1955, well before OSHA was in existence.