I didn’t meet my first patient on the street, in a hospital or in a clinic. I don’t know my first patient’s hopes, dreams or fears. I don’t know whether my first patient was the matriarch of a large, loving, thriving family, or whether she was a quiet old woman who kept to herself. Until yesterday, I didn’t even know my first patient’s name – but I’ll call her Ethel, as that was the name we affectionately gave her on my first day of gross anatomy, in the cadaver lab, when we opened up her table and pulled back her sheet.

Ethel is pretty nondescript, as little old ladies go. I’d estimate her to be of typical elderly age, in typical elderly shape, having died of a typical elderly disease, the kind that people fight quietly day by day for years until they finally succumb to illness. I met Ethel on my third day of medical school, when I felt the farthest from a doctor I’ll probably ever feel. Despite years spent working in an Emergency Department, my third day of medical school was very viscerally overwhelming. Walking in, sweating from the heavy Caribbean air, met with an icy blast of air conditioning and the unmistakable, choking, suffocating smell of deceased humans fixed with formaldehyde. I saw a lot of stuff in the ER – I even saw people in the moments that life slipped away from them – but I found myself a little light headed and very jelly-legged. I tried to get a grip and pull myself together.

Ethel was lying face down on my table, with portions of her back already dissected away. The first lab group was huddled around her, ready to present their dissection. I leaned up against the wall and tried to keep my cool. You’re fine, I told myself, you’re a grown man now, and you’ve seen this kind of stuff before, so don’t make a fool out of yourself.

I could almost see her facial features, if I crouched down a little – don’t pass out – I didn’t expect her to look so tiny – don’t pass out – I wonder if she was ever married – don’t pass out – I wonder if she has kids – don’t pass out – I wonder if she knows how intimately we’re going to become acquainted with her – don’t pass out – I wonder if she believed in God – don’t pass out – I wonder what she would say, if she could see us now.

Fortunately, I didn’t pass out. As soon as the presenting student launched into an explanation that this was her trapezius, and it covered her rhomboids, and it was innervated by the 11^th cranial nerve – I started to look at Ethel so clinically that I no longer felt sick about anything except for my impending practical exam. In the coming weeks and months, as we peeled back each layer of fascia, and followed the course of each artery, and tried not to sever the tiniest threads of nervous tissue, it was sometimes hard to remember that Ethel was a person. When I looked at her on the table, I saw muscle and bone and flesh and organs.  Then, when I least expected it, I’d catch a glance of her face, or find myself holding her hand while I retracted one of her upper extremities, and for those few moments, Ethel would become human again. But as quickly as she would appear, she’d be gone, and I’d return to the academic mindset I had adopted.

Yesterday, we had a Ceremony of Thanks to honor the donors who made our cadaver lab possible, and it was very moving and beautiful. Students commemorated the non-denominational service with music, and read reflections out loud. We had the opportunity to hear from a living donor – a man who’d someday be lying on the table, as Ethel did – who thanked us for our dedication to the study of medicine. We lit candles to honor our donors as well as any other intentions we held, and I got to light a candle for my recently deceased grandmother.  I had missed her funeral because of my studies, so this ended up being a very profound moment for me. A student even played a perfect rendition of Amazing Grace and O Danny Boy on the bagpipes (yes, bagpipes – being a Southsider, it was hard to keep my composure during this portion of the event).

However, the most moving, humbling moment of the entire ceremony came when they read through the names of our donors. Not only did I learn Ethel’s name – a name I won’t reveal for privacy reasons, but as sweet a name as any I had ever heard – but I learned that Ethel preceded her husband in death by only a few days… and her husband was the cadaver on the table immediately adjacent to mine; they had both donated their bodies to science.

What a flood of emotions that brought.   What a noble, selfless act, and what a testament to the strength of their love for each other, to give us the greatest gift of all, together in eternity. Might we all be so lucky to exit this world enveloped in that kind of love, fearless, walking into death with such quiet confidence. I thought of their surviving family – of any children they may have  – who are, at this writing, celebrating their first Thanksgiving without either of their parents. I hope they know their mother and father have left a legacy on this earth that will long outlive them. That for every patient I’ll treat in the future – for every life that I can try my best to improve and to save – none of that would be possible without their mother, my first patient. Through her death, their mother has given countless others the gift of life. I was reminded of the last thing my late grandmother said to me – “I believe in you, remember that!” – and couldn’t help but feel that Ethel believed in us, too.

I was back in the lab early this morning to review and teach my portion of our dissection. But as I walked into that cool, empty lab and looked around at the rows of tables and cadavers, my perspective had been irreversibly changed. These were not just cadavers, and they were not reduced to being inanimate anatomical models – these are all people. Every table represented a life lived, a life lost, and a life given for the hope of helping with something greater. I knew these things since my first day of anatomy lab, but today, I felt these things – really felt them. And Ethel would always be Ethel, now and forever, not just a composition of muscles and nerves and tissue but a living, breathing, dying person who gave us such a profound gift. I am humbled and honored to learn the human body from my first patient, and I hope to be the best physician I can to preserve her legacy forever.

Thanks, Ethel.