In an unusually cheery lab on the sixth floor of the Health Sciences building, two rows of 10 bodies slept under white sheets. On their third day of orientation for the UW School of Medicine, 80 medical students were about to meet their first patients.

Mitra Barahimi’s eyes flitted from face to curious face as she and other first-years prepared to strip off the airy coffins.

“I’d heard so many things about it before having actually seen a cadaver, but it sort of felt surreal because they’ve been so processed that they don’t even look real,” Barahimi said. “I kept having to tell myself there used to be a human life behind this body.”

Over the next six weeks, Barahimi and her peers will dissect the cadavers that live in this lab. For many, this anatomy and embryology course marks the first time they’ve touched the icy limbs of the dead. But, as their profession dictates, it won’t be the last. Medicine is a field most intimately acquainted with the human body and, more specifically, death – a phenomenon the rest of us politely tuck into the backs of our minds until a tragedy jolts it awake.

All of these students will encounter a patient who’s dying, a patient they cannot save, likely even on a daily basis. But for now, secure within the sympathetic walls of a classroom, they are here to learn.

“This is what these people wanted,” Barahimi said. “They’ve donated their bodies, so I took solace in the fact that they wanted to be our teachers.”

The first task the teachers submitted themselves to was an incision across the chest bone, where the skin was peeled back to expose the sternum.

Nathan Furukawa, another first-year medical student, and the three others in his group were a bit timid, so they decided to rotate the use of the scalpel, each performing a portion of the cut.

But they’re students, and they often stumble through the steps. Body parts are occasionally dropped on the floor, or certain anatomical anomalies trigger chuckles or inspire crass nicknames. But fourth-year medical student Linda Ding considered humor a way to cope with the stress of the job.

“There’s a lot of dark humor in the cadaver lab that helps us make it through this really hard, trying time,” Ding said, recalling her own experiences. “I think if you ask any medical student, they’ll tell you some jokes involving the cadavers. And it’s terrible that we do that, especially because we’re supposed to respect these bodies—and we do — but it’s just a defense mechanism for ourselves, as well.”

With one year until graduation, Ding has chosen her specialty: surgery. After finishing a four-week rotation in the surgical ICU at Harborview, though, she found she was more vulnerable to the shock of breaking bad news to families than dealing with death itself. Though only charged with reporting general information, some worried relatives pressed her for more answers, wondering if their sister or husband or child would wake up. Most of the interaction was left to the doctor.

“When I was standing there listening to this discussion, I did not envy the resident or attending’s position because, most of the time, it’s not what the family wants to hear,” Ding said. “It made me very uncomfortable, but I realized one day I have to be in that position. So, I try to focus on how the doctor is phrasing it so I know what to say.”

Interacting so casually and frequently with death has spurred the students to ruminate on their own mortality, an unpleasant but inescapable thought. Experiences in the labs and in the field excise the mythical nature of death and repackage it in a sterilized, formaldehyde-laced container.

Ding admitted that she’s extremely anxious about death.

“It’s one of the things I fear most,” Ding said. “I’m not going to go around thinking about it all the time, but, if I really were to sit down and reflect, I think I do have a lot of internal anxiety. So, I wonder if my choice to go into medicine, specifically surgery, has something to do with wanting to prevent death.”

For a group of people largely in their carefree twenties, it’s still a delicate topic to dominate a discussion.

The medical students, feeling so appreciative toward the donors in their anatomy courses, also wondered if they’d sign away their own bodies to medicine.

“I couldn’t answer that question at the time,” Ding remembered. “I thought, ‘I don’t know if I could let my body get cut up like this.’ It’s not neat. We’re not surgeons; we’re medical students, and we don’t know how to dissect. We’re learning.”

Furukawa, though, has contemplated returning the favor to another batch of medical students one day.

“At that point, it’s no longer me,” Furukawa said. “It’s just a shell. That’s not for a while, though. I don’t plan on dying anytime soon.”

Furukawa concluded with a nervous laugh, perhaps masking deeper emotions. The conversation then turned serious, and it became clear that part of handling a subject still so intangible is not knowing exactly how you’ll react when a heart stops beating – whether with anger, with tears, or with a sensitive yet distant smile for the optimistic family pacing the waiting room.

“It’s tough; death is something that’s not a joking issue,” Furukawa said. “But at the same time, there’s a lot of potential for commonality that can come out of it. We all share some key life experiences: We share birth and we share death. Everyone dies. I hope it’s something I’m able to find a way of understanding, because I certainly haven’t found it yet.”

Reach Lifestyles Editor Rachel Solomon at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.