5 Days of Human Dissection
posted in Uncategorized, Research & Science, Medical Community |
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Day 1:
I meet Helen, the heavy-set donor cadeavor whose tag informs us that she was 84 years old and that she died of cervical cancer. She has been preserved in formaldehyde for about 9 months and is now reborn as a cadeavor at the Institute for Anatomical Enlightenment in Denver, Colorado. She lies completely untouched and we have a lot of work to do over the next 5 days. It takes me and my team of 6 New Yorkers about 8 hours to reflect the skin from the adipose layer all over the entire body save the face and vagina. The high fat content of her body is just dripping with formaldehyde and it’s a messy job. This is my first dissection and I was unsure of the emotional response of this experience - but surprisingly once I get started- I can’t stop. When the day is done and I close my eyes, all I can do is reflect the skin in my head as I pass out on the couch.
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Day 2:
If I thought yesterday was messy, today brings way more oozing and a strong smell of formaldehyde. Every part of me reeks of this sweet toxic smell and I can even taste it in my mouth. Luckily the fumes are heavier then air and settle down so I don’t get the headache I’m anticipating. This adipose layer varies in color from yellow/orange to yellow/white and the density varies throughout the body - as thin as a centimeter and as thick as 4 inches - but one thing is for sure - it’s everywhere. It is so heavy my left arm, which holds the hemastat (a thin surgical plyer) gets tired easily. A great technique for skillful dissection involves using the scalpel more like a paintbrush on the adhesive fascial layer as the hemastat pulls the tissue away from the body. Adipose is irregular loose connective tissue but it absolutely is adding structural support to the body. It has these bandings in the thorax that look like muscle striations running through it in areas that must do a lot of work - but there are no muscles here! I hear chatter that they must be the Louis Schultz bands of fascia that he writes about. We guess that the atrophied legs tells the story that Helen spent a few years in a wheel chair, so she probably needed these extra bandings to move her upper body around. We assess that she has a functional assymetry running through her. Her left hip is anteriorly tilted with a posterior shift, her right hip is posteriorly tilted with an anterior shift. She appears to be about a 25 degree Natural Posterior Tilted structure with an extremely high elastin to collagen ratio. Her muscles almost fall apart if not properly reflected. We end up removing the adipose layer and actually have a chance to reflect the superficial trapezius and latissimus dorsi from the midline. Her muscles are not much thicker than a credit card.
Day 3:
I’m a bit hungover this morning from the big Rolfing graduation party from my alma mater, the GSI, in Lyons last night. So much fun seeing all the old teachers, but I’m paying the price this morning. Thankfully, the owner Todd Garcia, has burned a lot of sage (only in Colorado) and the place doesn’t smell bad at all. Our morning discussion brings up a very interesting fact about adipose. For one it can show a full read on an ohmmeter when the contacts are placed on any two places on the body. It is totally electric, pizeoelectric to be exact. I know this can’t be true but someone mentioned that there is so much stored energy in the human body that you could run a small city for a week. Sounds like something out of the Matrix. But it is an amazing layer of connective tissue that has suffered a bad rap in todays world. Everyone fears fat. But it is so necessary and vital for life. All the nerves in our body are surrounded by fat pads to help keep functional movement. Adipose transmits a field outside the skin of our body much like a radio antenna - what it is broadcasting is open to discussion (maybe thats what the aura is). It has polarity, and I believe the head side is negatively charged, the feet positive. Perhaps this polarity has something to do with the chakras. After sharing our feelings, I quickly move into the knee. I fully dissect all the structures of the lower leg, thigh and separate the femure from the tibia. Just amazing how the biomechanics of this joint work. Of interest were that the semitendonosous, the medial hamstring, flows into the tibial fascia down the lower leg helping to create a counterrotation at the knee (lateral femur/medial tibia/fibular head). This is extremely important when dealing with patellar diversion, meniscus tears and knee pain. Another interesting discovery for me was that the biceps femoris (lateral hamstring) flows into the fibular head (the common anatomy attachment) but also is deeply invested down into the fibular fascia dissappearing into the lateral malleolus. Biomechanically this structure can dominate a lateral/lateral knee - which creates an uncomfortable leg and puts to much pressure on the lateral meniscus. Part of the team open the viscera to discover numerous fascial adhesions of the greater omentum, transverse colon, and small intestines. The small intestines are so adhesed to each other it takes 30 minutes to pull them apart. Helen has had a hysterectomy and her appendix is removed. She might have leaky gut syndrome and/or endometreosis. One thing is for sure that she was butchered by her surgeons. Her transverse colon makes a zig-zag and is totally impacted and her stomach is as big as an NFL football. We also find that she has had a full knee replacement on the other knee and a bunionectomy.
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Day 4:
What a day. We completely eviscerated her abdominal cavity today. The smell was malodorous from the fecal impactions running the entire length of her digestive tract which made the process very slow going and careful - we didn’t want her poop spilling out everywhere. When I dissected her stomach from her esophagus, it looked like blood or fecal matter oozing out. She might have died in her sleep from bleeding out into her guts, but we will have to wait and see more. We are pretty certain that she did not die from cervical cancer like we were informed - she had no cervix! Her vagina was stiched closed where the cervix used to be. We found staples around her ureters and round ligaments near her sacrum and strange rubber tubing coming out of her kidneys. Perhaps these were drains left in from a surgery or maybe they were additional ureters used to drain the urine from the kidneys. Her kidneys were very interesting - they are packed in fat that make them double in size and triple in mass. And working off the idea that adipose is a transmitter model - in oriental medicine kidneys relate to the emotion of fear. Could the kidney fatpads broadcast our fear in a signal to another predator? Is that what the sense of “fear” in another is?
I got to experiment with the chakras today. I wanted to see if I held a pendulum above the 7 main chakras if there would be any movement or energy in my rose quartz. I started with the celiac nerve trunk - also known as the solar plexus. There was no movement. Why would there be? She’s dead. Is energy only available when life is present? Not according to the ohmmeter. As my colleagues questioned what I was doing I persisted with the root chakra and sure enough there was a huge counterclockwise swirling motion. Ah ha! Something is going on - her solar plexus might have been blocked energetically and the lack of movement of the pendulum was the sign. Her movement patterns showed that she did not use this part of her body and with good reason - her left kidney was dropped and everything was adhered to everything. I proceeded to get a strong clockwise rotation at both the third eye and the heart chakra. I double checked the root chakra and got the same results. This dissection is amazing because we are not limited by a medical school curiculum or other specific research. We can do what we want. We used midtide to determine the motility and patterns in the joints. For those of you who might not have heard of this - gravity has a measurable effect on all things with mass. This effect is contraction and expansion. This can be sensed in joints in 10 second motions - creating a 20 second cycle. Helen’s joints will twist into their counterrotations - revealing the dysfunctional path of least resistance. Just amazing. So what might be going on that I can read the pattern of the chakra’s? I’m going to have to sneak over to the other 2 cadeavors tomorrow and see what happens.
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Day 5:
The final day. Cracked a chest cavity, completely eviscerated the lumbar spine and pelvic floor, found what a prolapsed sigmoid colon looks like, started dissecting a jaw but was recruited to remove a heart from George, the 91 year old WWII veteran, and finished with a dissected kidney, spleen and pancreas. Our poor Helen must have suffered tremendously during her later years as most of her lower blood vessels were clogged or calcified, her lungs seemed weak, she had advanced kidney disease, a large bone spur on her S1/L5 joint and a badly out of pattern L4/L3 counterrotation. Her entire body had to cater to her many visceral surgeries and the subsequent fascial adhesions and scarring that occured. She was so restricted in her digestive tract that I don’t think she ate anything. If she did it was just pure sugar - probably Tab or something. I’m assuming she was on an IV for her nutrition. Her rectum was so tight that it was not much larger than a straw. How could you possibly go to the bathroom unless it was almost liquid? At the beginning of her esophagus - where it splits with the trachea, it was almost completely closed off. I couldn’t even fit my pinky finger through. I ended up “rolfing” it open and getting my index finger through - wow, if I could only to that on my living clients.
Something really cool happened. I whipped out my pendulum on George to see if I could get readings. George’s brain was removed so there was no movement at the third eye. His heart was still in his chest but again no movement. He had a pacemaker and an enlarged heart - his aorta was tacked up into his plural dome and forced the heart to be sidebent left. This pattern drags the right kidney too far superior and the left kidney drops way down towards the pelvis- there was a so much slack in the femoral vein it had a bend in it as it lay over the psoas tendons from this. Again, no movement with the pendulum at his solar plexus or hara. But…his visceral organs had been removed and layed nicely on the table. His liver was massive and cirrotic and did not yield any reading. But his spleen and intestines both had very strong clockwise swirls. The spleen is definitely part of the solar plexus region and the intestines lay right in the middle of the hara. I also got a clockwise swirl from his brain that lay next to the organs. Wow - what is going on with this - I thought for sure that the connective tissue was where the energy was. But could the organs be the main source? Crown and third eye anatomically relate to the brain and brain stem; throat chakra is thyroid, larynx and esophagus; heart chakra is self explanatory; solar plexus is celiac nerve plexus, liver, stomach, duodenum, pancreas and spleen; hara is small intestings; and root chakra is the genitals. If anyone has any insights on this please email me.
The ladies at our table had a good laugh at Rey and I when we couldn’t figure out the vagina. They assumed our inability to identify the parts (from the inside out is way harder by the way) translated to our personal lives. So innappropriate.
The cadeavor Rose turned out to be an idiopathic scoliotic with harrington rods in her back. This was extremely enlightening to see what the scoliosis does to the organs (or for that matter that the organs are driving the scoliosis). Her heart was extremely shifted left (so far that they had broken all of her ribs in 2 places on that side and probably had removed some of the bone) and her liver was extremely shifted right and most of the tissue was organize superior and lateral so she had a tiny left lobe. The falciform ligament didn’t look like the culprit and there was no insight to be had for me. One thing Liz noticed was how stuck the greater omentum was into her left hip. It’s something I’m going to pull out of on all my scoliosis clients, that is for sure.
So I finished my day with a soak in a bath of baking soda and epsom salt this evening to draw the formaldehyde out of my body and fell asleep thinking about all that I saw and learned. I don’t think I will ever see the human body the same. It’s just so absolutely amazing. I am so going to try and honor my own body by eating right for my blood type, doing yoga, moving, exercising, working less (sorry to all who can’t get an appointment - it’s only going to get harder now) and getting so much visceral manipulation to make sure everything is in order and integrated so I don’t need a barbaric surgery. I’m also going to make sure that I return the favor and donate my body to science - maybe then the future generation of Structural Integrators can cut me open and see the evidence of what we can do.