(no subject)
Hush.
"Those are lungs!" gesticulates the surgeon, carefully lifting up the ribcage the way a mechanic pivots the hood of a car. "I have some here for y'all to look at - pass them around."
I take one and over the coldness of the room, the sweat droplets under my latex gloves I can feel the tense, rubbery surface. Smooth and oddly soft, careworn through years of use, an anoymous organ sits naked in my palm. I give the lung a gentle squeeze and it modestly deflates.
"Ah," notices my professor, "Pulmonary alveoli are so small that they won't give up air easily unless they're pushed - they can hold air for a long time."
***
You will die. Someday.
After your passing - whether by pestilence or brutality, in anger or in love - a final breath will lie silent at the bottom of your lungs. Properly embalmed the tissues will evade decomposition for centuries and the air will stay trapped, motionless, imprisoned by your uninhabited flesh. Donate your body to a medical program and your lungs might be excised - displayed with hundreds of other lungs in large cases and shown off to ennuied third graders, warning them against the dangers of smoking, sending them into yawning fits with case studies of emphysema and chronic bronchitis.
And through it all your last unused pockets of air will be passed over for what they could have been - a scream, a sigh, a prayer - and will remain so along with hundreds of their counterparts behind plexiglass; a macabre display of actions untaken.
"Those are lungs!" gesticulates the surgeon, carefully lifting up the ribcage the way a mechanic pivots the hood of a car. "I have some here for y'all to look at - pass them around."
I take one and over the coldness of the room, the sweat droplets under my latex gloves I can feel the tense, rubbery surface. Smooth and oddly soft, careworn through years of use, an anoymous organ sits naked in my palm. I give the lung a gentle squeeze and it modestly deflates.
"Ah," notices my professor, "Pulmonary alveoli are so small that they won't give up air easily unless they're pushed - they can hold air for a long time."
***
You will die. Someday.
After your passing - whether by pestilence or brutality, in anger or in love - a final breath will lie silent at the bottom of your lungs. Properly embalmed the tissues will evade decomposition for centuries and the air will stay trapped, motionless, imprisoned by your uninhabited flesh. Donate your body to a medical program and your lungs might be excised - displayed with hundreds of other lungs in large cases and shown off to ennuied third graders, warning them against the dangers of smoking, sending them into yawning fits with case studies of emphysema and chronic bronchitis.
And through it all your last unused pockets of air will be passed over for what they could have been - a scream, a sigh, a prayer - and will remain so along with hundreds of their counterparts behind plexiglass; a macabre display of actions untaken.