Something in common with an owl?!

For all intents and purposes, I have to say I'm a night person. I love sleeping in and don't enjoy waking up at 6 in the morning to get ready for school. In fact, in my world, the sun rises close to noon. (I must operate by a different time zone...) I get that afternoon lull otherwise referred to in recent commercials as three-thirty-itis. I need that sugar fix to keep alert and even then, I just...can't. seem. to. concentrate. By evening, however, I feel myself 'waking up', being more alert and productive. It's not that I don't get productive during the day but more like I reach my peak in the evening. And then I can go all hours of the night. Say there was a need for last-minute studying for the next day's big final, I'm one of those who'd pull an all-nighter rather than wake up early to do the job. All things considered, that's why I love the weekend. Weekends allow me to exercise this routine at my leisure. Catching up on my paused-for-the-week recreation, it's no surprise I end up slumbering past the time I should really be.

It's no problem during the weekends because I get to make up for it by waking up whenever the next day, but like last night, it's a nightmare trying to get to sleep. I toss. I turn. it's like I'm searching for that elusive comfortable position that will magically make my eyes go heavy and be my ticket to dreamland. I will myself to breathe slowly, breathe deeper. Fool my body into approaching deep sleep. But my mind is furiously working all the while and therein lies the problem. Even if I was physically worn out, if my mind isn't tired then it's half the battle lost. So I tell myself, "Stop thinking. Think of nothing." But this doesn't really help considering that I am officially still thinking. I wonder if I will ever get to sleep. I yawn. Excitedly, I prepare to slip into sweet sleep...but I don't. At some point I end up asleep as proven by my jolting awake to the alarm's incessant ringing in my ears. (Already??) But I have to wonder if I was ever really asleep or caught in that state between waking and dreaming the whole time...

This morning, a post-mortem/autopsy was part of my early morning plans. Sounds like a gruesome way to start a day but you have to attend what you have to attend I suppose. It was the 4 of us students. 1 scrubbed in to assist/have close contact with the action while the 3 of us sat in the viewing gallery of sorts, which is basically sitting behind a pane of glass. I was a little apprehensive about the experience but told myself it probably won't be too bad. It was just that...the idea of more real-looking dead bodies with most having questionable deaths...and the high probability that the face would be exposed...I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Our lady was a suicide case. I won't go into the gory details so much as skim through the proceedings. Basically, the body is laid out, nothing is covered. What needs to be done is to make 2 cuts across and down the middle of the thorax and then remove the ribcage and subsequently, all the organs en masse. Then you remove the brain.

The need for a post-mortem is to figure out the cause of death when you aren't quite sure how they died. So this is either stuff like homicide or suicide, or funny deaths in the hospital query cause. Then the duty pathologist will form a hypothesis and section the organs to figure out the pathology. So my experience? Well, sitting through it wasn't too bad. What got me was the smell. It was bad but tolerable and worse once you get to the bowels. But I'll spare you my thoughts. I breathed through my mouth the whole hour and a half and I kept yawning so I guess excess carbon dioxide does contribute to yawns lol. It was a really strange sensation, watching the post-mortem being done. I mean, in surgery, only the part you cut up is exposed and the cuts are little neat ones made with a scalpel. Here, the post-mortem knife just goes *gssshhh* through and the guys just snap through the ribs and skull like nobody's business. Even dissecting a cadaver, which I suppose is as close as you can get, is just not the same since a cadaver is fixed and this was just...bloody. And watching everything opened up, it's like the organs are wearing her as a costume. Weird. They do stitch the bodies back up afterwards though which is good, funeral purposes or otherwise.

It's a shame that in the end her emotional pain led her to ending her life (and it's always worse for those left behind) because her organs were textbook pristine really. She wouldn't have had any problems for a while. Clean arteries, smooth liver, no signs of smoking in the lungs. A whole new meaning to beautiful on the inside;)