Corpus

Micah Silberstein

Corpus is a series of vignettes that draw connections between the organs dissected in anatomy lab and the human experiences related to these organs in life — the thrills, the conflicts, the failures, the wounds.

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Lungs

The diaphragmatic surface (base) of the lung, when static, is semilunar and concave, moulded on the superior surface of the respiratory diaphragm, which separates each lung from the corresponding lobe of the liver, and the left lung from the gastric fundus and spleen. — Gray’s Anatomy

—

I remember being folded over in the back seat of a minivan, five years old, with a sandy blonde bowl cut, pudgy cheeks, and a little cleft chin, wondering if there was some position I could sit in, some contortion at the edge of anatomical feasibility, that would help me get the stale air out of my lungs. I remember feeling sorry for my lungs, the way the wheeze sounded like a cry for help. I remember feeling the air fighting its way out, squeezing through too-tight passages, no way to help it along its way. I remember understanding what “forever” felt like in that moment, because I was sure it would never end, that every breath would be a fight, that every waking moment would be one in which I had to bargain with my body for a moment of relief, that one wrong move would send me back to the emergency room, full of worried parents, needles, bright lights. 

I remember being folded over in the back seat of a minivan, calculating when it might be worth it to just give up on the breathing, wondering if it would just keep getting tighter in my chest, if someone could just put a straw through my throat and pry it open, wondering, teary-eyed, why my mom or dad weren’t fixing it, why nothing seemed to help.

I remember the nebulizer, the loud gnashing machine, the noxious-looking white vapor that tasted like old plastic and sat heavy in my lungs, how I would sit in bed shaking and gripping the small yellow box like a life preserver.

I remember running downfield on my first day of lacrosse, the winter chill still thawing, and the sound of the wheeze coming back, creeping up from deep in my lungs like an old friend long estranged, unwilling to let go. I remember it, breathing more deeply when an actor in a movie struggles for breath, just to make sure it’s them, not me, that is struggling.

I remember it still, my body being unable to tell whether the vibrations are coming from inside or out when the elevated train rolls by overhead and shakes my chest.

It was two decades ago, but these memories fill every crevice of my psyche. Every moment of challenge and every thought of doubt carry the weight of a breath drawn, pained, through vice-grip lungs.

Brain

Continue turning the atlas pages until the hippocampus appears and continue even further until the hippocampus becomes very identifiable on the sections in the atlas. Hippocampus means “seahorse,” but in cross sections, it reminds many of us of a jelly-roll.

Clinical significance of the hippocampus relates to its role in storage of memories. In a now-classical clinical case, a young man known as H.M. had both temporal poles removed in an effort to control intractable seizures. The lesion included large segments of the hippocampus bilaterally. Upon recovery, it was discovered that H.M. was no longer able to form new (declarative) memories, although he could remember most of his life up to the point of the surgery. — Medical Neuroscience Dissection Guide

—

Harry sat on the sofa in his grandparents’ living room—he felt petrified, more a relic than an antique—trying to count how many years it had been since his grandmother really started to change. By the time he graduated from college, it was obvious. She began to relate to conversations only loosely. She could follow the tone and mirror the affect of others, but had fallen into a deep nostalgic spell from which she could not wake.

Harry thought back to dinner five years ago with her and grandpa. It was 5:15 PM on a Wednesday, and the restaurant, Rosebud, which struggled even at peak hours, was dead empty. The head of his beer had fizzled out, leaving a wispy puddle of thin white foam on the top of his drink. His grandmother’s yellow-hued prosecco still fizzed steadily, the new bubbles streaming rapidly from a few distinct points in her glass. The glass itself was intricately carved, and it was not fully clear, but rather took on a translucent, hazy-white color, like how sea glass looks after a few decades of being brushed by the waves. It stood out from the rest of the glassware, which was minimal, sharp, and geometric.

Harry had just explained his new software engineering job to his grandparents, knowing the whole time they would not understand it. He hardly understood it himself. He was a Data Engineer at an old telecoms company that was struggling to maintain relevance. Most people his age were surprised to hear such companies were still around. He was tasked with building a data pipeline that would receive audio data and strip it of its metadata—time of recording, location recorded, device used, et cetera—and push the data onwards to the next part of the pipeline. He had no clue why. He was tired of explaining it.

“How have you been grandma?” he asked, looking for a way out.

“Oh… I had a bridge game today. They were… good company,” she replied. She strained for the words. In crafting her response, she had to retrace her day backwards from the present moment to the bridge game in sequence, so as not to lose her line of thought.

Harry was struck by the transparency of her backhanded praise. She used to be a master of hiding insults in neutral speech. She could poison a word without a trace, leave you feeling sick or doubtful without ever knowing why. It had made him wary as a child, distant and resentful as an adult. But now, seeing her too weak to twist the knife, it made him sad.

“Have I told you that story?” she asked Harry. 

“Which?”

“Well, Momma was a one-of-a-kind card player, the best in town,” she continued.

Harry had heard it. In fact, she told this story every time he saw her, a few times a week. She told it so often he already knew there was nothing he could say to get her to stop. He sipped his beer. It tasted as flat as it looked. Warm, too. He was surprised at how fast it got bad.

Now, sitting on the hard couch in his grandparents’ apartment, he retraced the timeline back even further. Before that dinner, before he’d even left for college, there must have been signs. The story was that she had retired because of her hearing, that young children were better off being heard, that it was vital for their development. No one said the word “dementia” until it was so obvious it was not even worth defining. But her children—Harry’s mom and her brothers —knew well before the word was ever uttered. They said it without saying it, something they’d learned from their own mother.

Harry traced it back even further. He wondered if he had ever even known her as she once was—quick, unencumbered by hard, old memories. But now, sitting on that old couch, Harry faced his grandmother. She was facing him, too, but her gaze was fixed far past him.

“Do you know when my momma is going to be back?” she asked. “I’m ready to go home.”

“Your mother’s passed, grandma,” Harry replied, “and this is home.”

She focused her gaze on Harry. She stared for a few moments, and smiled.

“I can stay here?” she asked. “God bless you.” Her gaze shifted back into the distance.

Harry looked into her eyes. They were glazed over, watery, and dull. He watched them closely as they slowly traced memories in the horizon, memories that washed over her like waves lapping on the shore.

Heart

Sinuatrial (SA) node: the “pacemaker” of the heart, where initiation of the action potential occurs, located at the superior end of the crista terminalis near the opening of the superior vena cava (SVC).

Atrioventricular (AV) node: the area of the heart that receives impulses from the SA node and conveys them to the common atrioventricular bundle (of His), located between the opening of the coronary sinus and the origin of the septal cusp of the tricuspid valve. — Netter’s Clinical Anatomy

—

Emma took her seat in the back of the lecture hall. It was the engineering school’s biggest, spanning fifty rows and two stories. Even though she was ten minutes early, the mere thought of making eye contact with the professor—or worse, catching a stray question—forced her to a distant corner of the auditorium. She found a comfortable nest of empty seats in the forty-first row, on the right third of the building, somewhere more towards the middle than the edge. She sat down, put her overcoat in the seat to her right, and her bookbag in the seat to her left.

She watched her classmates file in through the front doors. At first it was a trickle; students would arrive and disperse, each one opting to sit as far away from their classmates as possible. From her seat, Emma was struck by the uniformity of the pattern emerging in front of her. It would have taken them hours to think up an algorithm that would separate the class so exactly and efficiently, but today, nearly thoughtlessly, they did it in seconds. She wondered if the early students were especially misanthropic: maybe the distance they kept from others helped them move smoothly through the world and blessed them with a few extra minutes each day. Or maybe everyone would sit like this given enough time and space.

As the start of class drew nearer, the influx of students grew from a trickle to a surge. One-hundred-and-some students shuffled in all at once, pressing out on each other such that they filled up whatever space they were in, forming thick columns in the stairwells that shunted students into the capillary-thin rows as they scrambled for what they thought was their best seating option. In her absent-mindedness, Emma felt repulsed. She thought they looked like ants ambling unconsciously through the tight corridors of one of those plastic toy farms. Embarrassed by her reflexive meanness and unsure if it was showing in her expression, she made a conscious effort to relax her face. She felt her brow unfurrow and the corners of her mouth go slack. As she released the strain, she felt that energy run from her head through her core down to her toes and back up, making her briefly and uncomfortably aware of her body’s natural rhythm. She felt sick and turned her focus back outwards for some relief.

It was then that Emma saw him. She had no idea why her eyes landed on him of all people. He was shorter than average and sank inconspicuously into the shuffling mass. He wore dull colors, dragged his feet in lock-step with the people beside him, and wore a blank expression, as if he was still pondering the dream from which he woke fifteen minutes ago. But she could not draw her eyes from him. His hair, jet black, was shining with gel. It arched stiffly upwards before crashing back down in a splay of diverging locks that eventually settled firmly just over the nape of his neck. Oddly, he was otherwise ungroomed. His stubble was thick, too thick, Emma thought, for someone in Introductory Math for Engineers, but it naturally ran along his features in such a way that everything she found beautiful in his face was amplified tenfold: his dark eyes, his wide-set and high-riding cheekbones. His jaw sat so low and heavy on his face that he walked with his mouth slightly agape. It made him look gentle in spite of his sharp features. She followed him with her eyes until he took his seat, toward the front.

After class, Emma returned to her room and brought up this man with Dina, her roommate.

“He looked tan. I don’t think it’s a vacation tan.” Emma said. “He’s short, maybe my height, an inch taller? Big hair though, black, almost down to his shoulders.”

She stopped herself before she described his face, the things that really drew her in, the stubble and the slack jaw. She did not want to sound sentimental or obsessed.

“Go to any frat house and you will find twenty men that look just like that,” Dina replied, mostly shocked Emma had brought up a man at all. Dina had known Emma since high school, and had never known her to pursue any man. She had never needed to, and never wanted to waste time that could be better used elsewhere.

Emma knew this class was the only chance she had to meet him, and over the course of the next few weeks, sat closer and closer to the front of the room. She would arrive early, as usual, but would never sit in the same seat twice. She even, at times, violated the unwritten rule that bound early-comers to sit far from each other in quiet and delicate tension. She could see her classmates’ faces strain at her transgression, but she looked past them, toward the future, when he would shuffle in and take a random seat.

Each day, Emma would take a new seat, and each day the late-comers would surge in with tidal force. Some days, she would not even see him in the mass. On the days she did see him, she would watch him get swept in the rushing flow up the stairs and rows past hers, or laterally to the other side of the room altogether. It was a frustrating experience. Sometimes it made her so tense she would clench her teeth, sometimes so hard it made her jaw sore. In these moments, she felt static, like her body was one continuous chunk of earth, without definition, without movement. She felt fixed to the chair and through her chair fixed to the building and the earth, and the earth’s spin slowed to a creep. She thought of days she would lie in the grass and watch the clouds speed over her, as though she was a stake in the fabric of the universe around which everything would spin. It felt lonely to be the axis, the static point about which the world spun, everything else tethered to her, moving in unison in a repulsive orbit.

She grew exhausted by the daily anticipation. She felt childish thinking so hard about where to sit, and foolish to be let down continually by something as silly as where some stranger sat. It had been months since she’d first seen him, seen him in that deep way that was impressed in her memory. Since then, she had been so preoccupied about where to sit that she hadn’t once looked at him so deeply again. She would look and know he was handsome and note the same features she had seen that first day, but it felt as if she were looking at a photo of him reproduced in a textbook. She was relieved to realize that the initial spark had worn off. She figured she’d only been keeping up her odd seating ritual out of pure habit. Eventually, she fell back in line with the former order. The awkward aberrations in the otherwise pristine arrangement of early-coming students were undone. The early-comers could relax. Emma, too, could relax. She reflected sheepishly on the previous months she had spent hopping seats. She felt desperate and romantic, and she hated herself for even trying.

Two months later, she’d nearly forgotten about the seat-switching affair. It was so distant she did not even feel embarrassed about it. She’d brushed him out of her mind and found the extra space entirely convenient. More room for Fourier and Laplace. She walked into the auditorium as usual, ten minutes early, thinking about her plans for the rest of the day, dinner with Dina, maybe she would call back that Sigma Nu boy. But as Emma climbed the stairs to her usual seat, an unnatural sheen caught her eye. Before she had time to process that it was him, her heart was beating out of her chest. The image of him that first day burned in her mind: he looked the same, or better, his hair slicker, stubble rougher, his tan had darkened and stood out starkly from his muted clothes.

What is he doing here so early? Emma thought. She noticed he was sitting further back than usual, and far from the next closest student. She could feel her heart beat at least six times between each step she took. She could feel her blood coursing through her, from her head through her core to her toes and back up. She felt strong and turbulent. She followed the pulse from her chest through her head, she could hear the blood rush past her ears, she felt like she could see the whole room at once. The blood rushed into her arms and hands, and her palms began to sweat. The heat and energy moved from her hands towards her gut, and she felt nauseous—the same way she felt before her sixth grade piano recital—anxious not of failure but of unanticipated success. Her heart was beating so quickly, so forcefully now that she could not hear her own thoughts. She felt the blood surge into her legs, she could feel exactly where she was placing her weight in the balls of her feet. She gripped the handrail to remain in contact with the earth. She felt the blood return to her heart. She felt full and centered, she could feel herself at once from her fingers to her toes; she felt expansive and uncontained to a single point in space.

Emma turned left into the row where he sat and walked briskly towards him. “Is this seat taken?” she asked.

Kidneys

The long axis of each kidney is directed inferolaterally and the transverse axis posteromedially, which means that the anterior and posterior aspects usually described are, in fact, anterolateral and posteromedial. An appreciation of this orientation is important in percutaneous and endourological renal surgery. — Gray’s Anatomy

—

“I’d rather die.” Dad said, half-jokingly. Too jokingly for a car ride home from the emergency department. The serious half wore on me more. I knew it wasn’t a matter of pride for him. I knew that something else had fucked him up, probably when he was much younger, probably one of his parents. Still, it was infuriating.

“They say you live just as long,” I said, unconvinced. “You only really need one.”

“That’s not the point,” he said.

I waited for the point briefly before I realized it probably wasn’t coming. We sat in silence for a while. Classic rock music was whispering out of the radio, barely audible. I felt tense, pulled taut like a bear trap. I was waiting for him to reach for the volume knob. He didn’t.

As we merged onto US-20 from I-94, I let out a sigh of relief. I didn’t love the country, but I hated nothing more than the interstate. Despite growing up in Chicago, these old rural highways made me feel a homey sense of warmth. There were pull-offs everywhere, hand-made signs advertising firewood, eggs, fruit, and vegetables. The corn grew close to the road, and huge crop fields framed the highway and shone a fresh green. The stalks stood tall and proud. I felt overwhelmed with abundance.

I could understand why my dad moved to Freeport. He practiced medicine his whole life in the city. It wore on him. There were a lot of people in that city, millions to disappoint, disrespect, or piss off. Just merging onto the highway there put you at risk of a rude gesture. He stuck out in the country, but he didn’t mind. He had a few acres of his own, a river nearby.

“You know, I’ve lived a good life,” he began.

I cut him off. ”A little early for a eulogy, I think.”

He continued. “I’ve seen a lot. I raised three smart, capable children. I worked my ass off. I got into just the right amount of trouble. I’ve lived happily for most of my life with an amazing woman. I feel lucky. I’m just saying, if I passed tomorrow, my only wish would be to go quick.”

You’re tired, I thought, you’re tired and you just want to give up.

I felt my resentment building. How could he be so selfish? What about me and my children? His parents lived until I was twenty—couldn’t he do the same for me? Was he that scared of asking for help? That scared of being a burden?

I thought of all the things he taught me that I would not be able to teach my own kids. How to make stupid decisions and live to tell the tale, how to grow joy from tragedy and loss, how to whistle through their pinkies, and how to put down their work once in a while. I thought about how they would grow up without the best storyteller I ever knew, how they might never know his laugh, or experience the warmth of his love.

The sun sank lower in the sky. Everything looked twice itself in this moment. The silver silos towered over us, reflecting the daylight in massive arcs over the crop fields. I could see every small crack in the road ahead, every slightly mispainted line. I saw every person in every passing car, napping passengers, singing drivers. I glanced over at my dad; he looked older than I remembered. I felt my eyes well. I reached over and turned the radio up.

Larynx

The vocal folds (vocal ligaments covered with mucosa) control phonation as a reed might function in an instrument. Vibrations of the folds produce sounds as air passes through the rima glottides (the space between the vocal folds). The posterior cricoarytenoid muscles are important because they are the only laryngeal muscles that abduct the vocal folds and maintain the opening of the rima glottides. — Netter’s Clinical Anatomy

—

When I think of my grandpa Hal, I remember his laugh first. He would crinkle his eyes so small you could barely see them, draw the corners of his mouth up tightly, and his dimples would show. It started with an “aah” sound, followed by distinct “ha-has” that were so well enunciated they almost sounded rehearsed. His laugh would rise and fall in volume, and become raspier towards the end.

His laugh frames how I think about him. He would laugh all the time. Not only when he found something funny, but also when he wanted to acknowledge us. In our family, the gift of being a grandparent was the opportunity to spoil your grandchildren unconditionally—without need to parent or scold. He spoiled us with joy; he showed us how to live lightly and to appreciate what we had. He did not live an easy life, but by the time his grandchildren were born, he was able to relax. He laughed as though he had earned it, as though he had put in his time, and now all he really needed to do was sit back and enjoy the things that meant most to him.

Grandpa Hal was about 5-foot-6 and had a ring of gray hair that did not connect in the front, like an abbot monk. The deep lines in his face, on his brow, around his mouth, and outside his eyes showed he was just as expressive in his youth as in his old age. He had a softly dimpled chin that looked as though someone had pressed their finger into it and the indent stuck. When he smiled, he smiled wide, and when he laughed you could see his many crowns.

He spoke kindly with strangers; he was outgoing and generous with his attention. He would engage with them earnestly and genuinely enjoyed hearing their stories.

His real first name was Julius, but my Grandma Lil would call him Julie, which drove him crazy—so he had us call him Grandpa Hal. He had a massive recliner chair that he had broken in perfectly. He used to set himself in front of the TV and sink deep into that recliner.

When I think of his laugh, really remember it deeply, this all comes back too, bound inextricably to the sound.

About the Author

Micah Silberstein is a second-year medical student at Carle Illinois College of Medicine in Urbana, Illinois. He received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he audited a few too many poetry classes, read Steinbeck in Salinas and Miller in Big Sur, and found a love of writing in the foothills of Santa Clara.