Warning: I'm on necropsy this week. It's a little hard to tell, because we get so desensitised that we can easily eat our lunch while reviewing pictures of bloody, disemboweled animal corpses, but I'm pretty sure that talk of necropsy is disturbing imagery for the average person. Proceed with caution. The point of the post is, basically, blood and gore.
Here's how necropsy rotation works:
We show up in the morning (9am start! how unusual!) and have a little tutorial with the pathologist teaching the roster. We go over all the cases that have been submitted for the day and talk about our differential diagnoses and what we might expect to find on post-mortem. We divvy up the cases between the students, then head off to the PM room floor.
The PM room is designed with an elevated viewing area in front of the entrance, which includes things like the tutorial room and locker room doors, and a lower floor area that takes up most of the room. You have to go down some steps and wade through disinfectant to get there, and the floor is usually pretty wet. It's filled with drains, metal tables, and all the equipment you might want: tubs to carry organs around in, clamps to put heads in while you saw them open, tables of knives, a band saw in one corner, stuff like that.
Something slightly distressing to some is that the animals don't always arrive dead. The upshot is that means a very fresh PM, rather than something that's been in a freezer for a month, but the downside is we have to euthanise them ourselves. In the small animal world, it's a simple injection. But euthanising large animals is, I find, particularly unpleasant and not for the faint of heart--the larger the animal, the worse it is. They're rendered insensible (and probably dead) by a captive bolt into their skull, then to make extra super sure that they're dead, you slash open their throat so they exsanguinate (translation: ocean of blood on the floor).
Once they're not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead, the students are unleashed. Basically, you go through everything, outside and inside, in a systematic way. While it's all very scientific and medical, to an outside observer, it's skinning, tearing out the heart and lungs, cutting through vessels and spilling blood everywhere, stuff like that. It's quite hack-and-slash feeling. When it's time to look at the abdomen, you've just got organs all over the place. And to check out the brain, you break out the saws and cut open the skull. The things you didn't realise you signed up for, eh?
One of the most disconcerting things is that the muscles keep twitching due to the nerves firing. I always find it startling, even when I know it's coming, that when you cut through a big nerve (like the sciatic), the leg jerks.
Something a little morbidly interesting is that the method of euthanasia dramatically impacts what the PM is like. I had a calf with a suspected central nervous system disease, so we didn't want to use a captive bolt and destroy the brain. I used the injection instead, which means the calf didn't exsanguinate like the others. Out of the three calves that were PM'd at the same time, guess whose table was drowned in blood?
At the end of the day, we have to write up everything we found and submit it for the pathologist to edit and finalise. We have these green sheets to take notes on, and by the end of the morning, both sheet and pen are saturated with essence of dead animal. Yet we just fold them up, take them home, and type it up on our computers like there's nothing unusual. I guess, to be honest, there isn't.
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