Nerd anthem

Pathology means "the study of suffering" (so I'm told) but what it really means is that you are a nerd with a microscope.

I like to explain pathologists as the hospital laboratory: everything you send to the lab you're sending to us-- blood samples, urine samples, tissue samples. Other doctors usually see us at conferences, waggling lazer pointers and babbling on and on about cells. (This involves looking smart in front of a bunch of people, which is always nice.) If they think of us at all, they picture us sitting behind microscopes in some cubicle or other, scanning, dictating, and scanning again... shuffling flats of slides from one pile to another until *bing* 5 o'clock, at which point we disappear (poof!) into a fleet of Lexuses (Lexi?) leaving a fading trail of perfume andVivaldi.

But what we're probably most famous for is autopsy.

Autopsy, I am told, means "to see for oneself" but I tend to think of it as the part of pathology that tends to get its own TV show.

My experience of autopsy takes place largely at the coroner's office. The first thing I want you to know about the coroner's office is that the walls of the service floor are painted just a baffling, gut-wrenching, nearly criminal shade of grey. I honestly cannot begin to imagine what possessed anyone to even make this color of paint. It's like they took a focus group and tried to think of a wall color that was even more depressing than black. Black, they said to themselves, has been done. Let's be creative!

The second thing I want you to do is this: I want you to go to thislife.org and click on "our favorites." There's an episode called something like "the house by loon lake" that feels pretty similar.

Here it is:
You drag all that schooling and all your smarty-pants studying and all those books you so laboriously crammed into your head to the table and you meet this stranger and you have an hour and a half or so to find something, a fulcrum, an edge, a nugget, just something that puts the story together. For an hour or so, you are immersed in this other person-- you walk into this person's world, follow them around for a while, poke yourself into their secret places-- you enter them, dissect them, measure them, peer at them intently, set aside little pieces of them in a jar, pause thoughtfully, scribble down a mass of little notes, and sew them shut.

I'm still a little unsettled by the idea of turning myself into a medical examiner. There is no way around how gruesome it is. No matter how tender you feel toward your patient, you are still covered in their gore; that horrible sucking sound is you-- carefully,precisely, professionally-- tearing their liver from their body. But I can't deny the attraction, the exhilaration of solving the puzzle, of finding the thread that unravels the tangle, of putting the sequence in line: abdonimal pain, gallstones, pancreatitis, death. So, when you picture me, it is in a vapor-lock mask, a disposable operating room gown, paper boots and a face shield, holding a (verycool!) huge curved knife and peering intently at the carefully cut surface of...-