Necropsy, From the Tiny to the Giant

Warning: Descriptions of dead animals.

Pathology rounds are every friday afternoon, and for as long as we've been in vet school, we've been encouraged to attend. It requires nothing on your part, simply show up, stand around the post-mortem room, and watch. At first, it's practically incomprehensible, but as you progress through the years you start understanding more and more of what's being said and what you're looking at. Pathology rounds are a regular fixture in (some of) our lives, a weekly occurrence that's gone on as long as vet school has.

And finally, it becomes our turn to take the floor, our turn to stand on the other side of the room and hold up the cold entrails of dead animals for all to see.

You see, this week I'm on necropsy. On friday, we are the ones to present the cases that come in during the week. Some come in dead already, some arrive alive and get euthanised on the premises. We hack apart their bodies completely and utterly, send samples off to the lab, and save whatever is interesting for path rounds.

Today we had three animals: a kitten, an alpaca, and a cow. I got the kitten. Nine days old, it had been found dead underneath its mom, suspected crushed/smothered. Everything was so tiny, it was hard to do the PM steps like normal. Her teeny tiny mouth and tongue, and teeny tiny GIT and kidneys and spleen and everything, and super teeny tiny uterus--actually it was pretty cute. Or at least I thought so, and one other person, but the production trackers thought that was weird, and were all, "Psh, smallies people." But at any rate, I kept accidentally crushing and tearing things, and fur got all up in everything, and it was very difficult to cut organs open and get a good look at everything. I practically needed a microscope.

So here I am, with my animal that can fit in the palm of my hand, holding up its tiny heart and lungs between two fingers and poking at it with a pair of forceps, and at the table next to me is the team working on the cow: heart the size of my head, a mountain of rumen contents all over the floor, sawing and hacking with giant knives, cutting the ribs with massive bolt cutters, an ocean of blood leaking out of their animal. The liver alone was an entire armful. It amazes me how these two very different creatures are so similar in their composition. My kitten's little heart the size of a fingernail had all the same components as the massive cow heart, just miniature.

The alpaca was interesting, too, just by way of being an alpaca.