four kidneys

“I am driving around New Jersey right now with four kidneys in my trunk.” I emailed my sisters because sometimes you have to spread the ridiculousness.  I sent the email when I was driving around NJ looking for an apartment to move into.  I drove by a cop car and realized I was praying to something-or-other that he wouldn’t pull me over.  Cause I mean really, four kidneys?  How do you explain that to a cop?

I picked up the kidneys in the morgue in the basement of the medical school.  I was leading a workshop on diabetes at a local shelter.  Because kidney disease is so hard to explain I thought some props would spice things up.  And come on, if Dr. Oz can do it, I can do it. In order to borrow organs from the school you first must talk to the right people, and second must visit our lovely mortician, Bob.

A side note on Bob, last year during anatomy he would occasionally pop into the lab while we were dissecting.  He would arrive when body parts started to mold.  He would arrive with some sort of saw and amputate the infected dead limb before the mold could spread to other bodies.  Sometimes though I think he was there just to creep us out.  One day we were dissecting some part of the abdominal cavity and we stopped working to wait for a professor to come over to answer some questions.  Well, lucky for us Bob came by instead.  Before we could do anything about it he was elbow deep in our lady’s abdomen.  He was elbow deep and gloveless in our lady’s adbomen and the sleeves of his sweatshirt were soaking up some serious body juice.  Pretty sure I threw up in my mouth.

So anyway, I had to make a trip to the morgue to pick out the kidneys I wanted.  Since I had never been there before, and since there really wasn’t an option, I nodded when Bob asked if I wanted a tour.  Walking between dead bodies Bob did not forget to point out his cat.  His dissected, skinned cat.  The only sense I could make of this was that his cat died recently.  I asked no further questions as the logic behind his thought process I will never understand.  He brought his dead pet cat to the morgue, skinned it, and then opened it up.  Get me the kidneys and get me the hell out of here.

The entire day was a bit of a bust.  Sick and congested I spent the entire morning looking at apartments in the rain.  I showed up at the shelter prepared to give the workshop on diabetes but they didn’t have me on their calendar.  And because things always happen in three’s, on my way home I was pulled over.  Unbeknownst to me my registration was expired, my car was towed on the spot, and I was stranded in the middle of nowhere, in the freezing cold, with no jacket.  Thankfully the four kidneys made it out of my trunk and back to the morgue, a whole 13 minutes before this final escapade.