Puns with Gross

Gross Lab. Day 2. You could make so many puns with the word "gross." I choose to forgo the tempting option.

The sense of awe is pretty much gone. You've cut into a human being who was once alive. You distanced yourself from it, and you're still here, still back for more. As the muscles are being exposed, you notice something familiar cutting through the ethanol fumes and formalin. That unmistakable smell: Meat. Right away I am reminded of my favorite childhood story: When escaping from the Russian gulags, prisoners would pick an extra man of sizable girth. Somewhere along their way through the unforgiving badlands of Siberia, they would kill him and eat him. Warped childhood? Nah, just useful tips from Soviet-era Pioneers (boy-scouts) disguised as didactic tall tales, all there just in case uncle Stalin decided to declare you an enemy of the people. Resisting the temptation, I forgo the opportunity to share the story (BTW, confirmed by real Russians) with my tablemates.

There are 8 of us. We are split into 4 groups of 2, and each group is assigned its own dissection. For those not mathematically inclined or currently attending dental school, 4 x 2 = 8. The dissections take several lab sessions to complete. Their culmination is the presentation, where we show off what we did, hopefully teaching everyone something in the process. The first presentation, as expected this being medical school and all, was an overachiever's multimedia extravaganza, and short of a string orchestra and a laser light show, everything was there. OK, OK, so it really was just handing out color printouts, some yammering about the dissection, poking the structures with a handy probe (see picture) which is the laser pointer of the anatomy lab, rattling some bones on a plastic man-sized skeleton, and guiding the tour to the cross-section pans filled with body slices. I always say, don't let the facts get in the way of a good exaggeration. The subsequent presentations lacked the pizazz of the original, but we're just an exhausted bunch of med students, right?