You Work Where? Anonymous

Telling my peers that I intern at a morgue catches them by surprise; typically, they look at me in bewilderment. Many question why I would want to do something like this. But I honestly do not think they would react with such astonishment if they could do what I do every day after school. When I arrive at the Veterans Affairs hospital, I scrub up and enter the morgue, where I am presented with numerous learning experiences.

Long intrigued by forensics, I applied to the VA hospital for an internship in the autopsy suite, and after my interview with the pathologist, I was even more enthusiastic and grateful for a hands-on opportunity to learn more about the human body.

On my first day, I learned how to sew up a body after an autopsy had been performed. In the days following, I accepted and released a deceased person, I sat in on a resident conference that discussed the death of a patient, and I learned three suturing techniques on an amputated leg. Since that first week, armed with a notebook to record all of my experiences, I have removed and dissected an eye and a femoral artery and observed a knee replacement surgery from an anesthesiologist's perspective.

Interning at the morgue continues to be a valuable and unique...