When I hold her stomach in my hands, I wonder what she ate. Whether she was a vegetarian or not. Maybe a vegan. I can’t be sure from her stomach alone. Her cadaver is on the table with a hollow hole in her abdominal cavity. Skin cut away, muscles stripped, completely bare. My lab partners and I can see the indentations of her bones. The rib cage still sits above her.
We had removed her GI tract. We sliced through the fatty tissue, pulling the intestines out like a rope. Now the goggles of my peers perch on their noses, elbows deep inside her cavity as they to cut away more tissue. Part of her GI tract is still tethered inside. I hold onto her stomach, waiting for them to finish. They lump parts of her intestines onto the metal table. Long and twisted like a coiled snake. The heap smells foul, the scent reaching my eyes and making them water. I grip the slimy sack in my hand tighter as I squeeze my eyes shut.
The stomach looks like a fanny pack. Like you could tie it around your waist with the tubes and carry your things in the body of the organ. We have to cut vertically through the tissue. With small scissors, I slice from top to bottom. Once cut, I place my thumb on either side of the cut and open it up. The inside of the stomach is lined with rugae, which look like the squiggly lines a toddler would draw. These rugae allow the stomach to expand when full and recoil when emptied. As I trace my fingers along the ridges, I imagine her stomach pumping in and out like an accordion. A churning machine, stirring particles into an acid bath.
Most people have experienced a gut feeling. It is almost indescribable. People will say they “just knew” or “my stomach just dropped” or feel a sensation like “butterflies.” There have been several times in my own life when I could feel the pulsing emotion in my stomach before it reached my brain. And I remember how my biology professor referred to the stomach as the “second brain.” As if the gut has a mind of its own, suggesting that it does more than just digestion and operates independently from the cranium upstairs. Scientists refer to this as the enteric nervous system, which controls over 100 million nerves traveling from the esophagus down to the rectum. The highway that these nerves and neurotransmitters travel on is known as the gut-brain axis.
The buzzing of the razor sounds like a swarm of bees. It echoes throughout the room as my peers begin shaving off her hair. Chunks of her gray hair fall onto the floor, which now looks more like a salon than a lab room. Someone lays out pieces of the bone saw on the table. Another person clicks the blade into place. The sharp blade is placed on the crown of her head. Her skull cap is thick, and we have to use all of our strength to push it open. The bone snaps, and it sounds like a kid cracking a candy bar in half. The saw circles the head until there are visible gaps, peering into the cranium. Now, we pull the saw back so that we don’t hit the brain. We garner the strength to pry off the skull cap, placing it on the mental table. I pick up the skull cap and run my fingers across the ridges and bumps.
While our second brain may not be able to help us work through complicated math and philosophical problems, it does something else entirely: it informs our emotional state of mind. We can blame the vagus nerve for this, which carries information from our gut to our brain. When activated, the vagus nerve can cause a sense of calm and compassion, but dysregulation can stimulate distress, anxiety, and fear. Within the second brain, there are also neurotransmitters at play, just like in the brain. The biggest player is serotonin, which controls the feelings of happiness and contentment. Serotonin dysregulation is linked to depression and anxiety. Interestingly, 95 percent of the body’s serotonin comes from the gut. Serotonin dysregulation is what causes depression and anxiety. All this research suggests that maybe paying attention to our gut feeling might not be so silly after all.
I walk out of the cadaver lab towards my locker. My coat reeks of formaldehyde, and there are stains on the sleeves. I hang it on the cold hooks, promising myself that I’ll wash it before the next lab session. My stomach begins to growl. It is past lunch and I haven’t eaten yet. And I wonder what gave her butterflies in her stomach. What made her nervous? Was it seeing her lover across a crowded room or maybe getting married? Did she have to take an exam to decide her career? Did she ever feel depressed or anxious, like I do? I’ll never get to ask, because for me she is just a body that I see three times a week on a metal slab. Her hollowed-out abdominal cavity sunken into the formaldehyde bath waiting for her students to return Monday morning. I hope she had a happy life. I hope she always listened to her gut.