Question: Rebecca, what's the cadaver anatomy lab like and how does it compare to FAMI?
Answer: I think it was about 4 years ago that Gail Anderson invited me to go along with a group of her students to a cadaver class at Bastry. Gail is a marvelous person, a gifted teacher and a generous and kind soul who happens to own Balance Within Pilates over in Redmond, Washington, a Seattle suburb. www.BalanceWithinPilates.com.
I was honored to have the opportunity and of course I participated but I ended up filling a role much bigger than I'd originally intended. Gail ended up not being able to attend and she asked me to guide her students through the process making sure they understood the connection of what we would be learning to the performance and teaching of Pilates.
When I took the course, it was held over 2 consecutive Saturday mornings and the group I was in consisted of a chiropractor, a midwife, a doula, a few physical therapists, a few massage therapists and a bunch of Gail's apprentices and graduated teachers. Some of those non-Pilates folks tended to dominate the class, especially that chiropractor who I ended up knuckle whapping, figuratively speaking.
I felt the diversity of the disciplines among attendees definitely took away from my experience and I wished for a single-purpose group.
Now, all these years later, that's what I've got.
The courses I'm offering are exclusively for my students who are in my Seattle studio for either April's Open Studio Week or August's Pilates Excel. I may be able to schedule an additional cadaver anatomy class in the fall attached to another workshop in my Seattle studio but the Bastyr fall school schedule is not yet finalized and we can't move forward until it is. I'll also be adding a class for our clients but that will happen outside my workshop schedule.
And I've changed the format of the class. The courses I'm offering are 5 hours in a single day.
When I took the class those several years ago, we followed a swallow of food in and out of all the places it goes and although it was fascinating, I'd rather have spent the time exploring in a more detailed way things that are relative to my work, to the work of teaching Pilates.
For my classes, I've asked Dr. Love to tighten the focus of her presentation to exclude things that do not directly have to do with the bones of the spine, pelvis and large joints, the muscles that stabilize and move them, the organs that route directly through the pelvic floor, the organs and muscles of respiration and, of course, the thing we use most in Pilates, the brain and the spinal cord.
I'm going to set out for you what you can expect from this experience and I'm also going to tell you a fool proof way to tell if you can handle it, but first I want to tell you a bit about Bastyr.
Bastyr University is a naturopathic school just north of Seattle, from my studio it's about a 20 minute drive in moving traffic and for the classes I've arranged in April and in August, we'll provide your transportation to and from Bastyr. When I talked to Dr. Love about her willingness to make her lab available to me and my students, she told me that her belief and the philosophy of the University is that everyone who has an interest in cadaver anatomy should have access to a class in a lab - we have bodies and we should have access to bodies.
Her passion for this work and her gift as an educator is extremely impressive. Even though I took her class several years ago I've never forgotten her words, I teach with her in mind every single day and I'm constantly inspired by her way of presenting complex material but in a linear and simple fashion - I try try try to do that in my own teaching.
I'm flat out thrilled to be able to work with her again.
And I think it's great that the philosophy of Bastyr makes it possible for folks like me - uncredentialed, non-matriculated nobodies who happen to love, live and breathe Pilates - to learn what can only be understood by an experience of this nature.
The years I've spent studying anatomy books, all the videos I've watched, all the lectures I've attended - none came within a million miles of what that class meant to me, to my teaching, to my clients and to everything I've done since.
There are things that you can best learn in certain ways, perhaps only learn in certain ways, and this is one of them!
If I recall correctly, the bodies are in the Bastyr lab for 2 years so that means the families are patiently waiting for the return of the remains of their loved ones for a really long time while folks like me can have the experience of a lifetime. I think that's pretty special and, not surprisingly, I will donate my body to science and hope that there is free access to it so others like me, on the fringe but of genuine spirit, intent and desire, can have at it.
I've also been to FAMI, the Functional Anatomy of Movement and Injury, and will compare and contrast the two down below but first, I want to take you through what you can expect if you come to Seattle for this experience. Here's how the cadaver anatomy class works.
We'll all travel to Bastyr, caravan style, and we'll take the short walk from the parking lot to the lab where we'll wait for one of Dr. Love's assistants to greet us and orient us to the location of the lab, the rest rooms, and generally what we can expect inside the lab.
Lab coats, gloves and respirators are provided. The lab coats are well used, the cuffs are dirty and they hang on rolling racks right outside the lab. The gloves, of course, are new, latex free and sized S, M, L. Only one person in the group I was in before, it was that chiropractor, chose to wear a respirator.
The respirators are offered because in the lab there's a smell of chemicals that folks who are sensitive may find unpleasant. I definitely consider myself to be ultra sensitive to smells - my allergies are so bad that I once went into anaphalyxis in the candle department at a department store! But I didn't think the smell of the lab was at all unpleasant or intense. In fact, the lab assistant will tell us about the system that pulls in fresh air into the lab; a complete exchange of air occurs often. It's not a toxic environment but you can definitely smell the formaldehyde that's used to preserve the bodies.
Personally, I am not squeamish at all, I've been first on all sorts of accident scenes and have seen all manner of trauma including death so I was never concerned that I would feel faint or queasy or weak.
I was not, however, prepared for the fact that there were 22 bodies in the lab.
When the lab assistant told us that, I actually had an "oh my" moment as I realized I may have a tough time focusing on our bodies in a room full of bodies.
And the bodies are not stowed away in drawers like you see on tv shows. They're out on rolling tables, bigger than gurneys, and they're all zipped into blue plastic bags. Blue plastic bags exactly like the kind they zipped my dad into when he died at home in 1993 and blue plastic bags exactly like the kind they zipped my mom into when she died at home last October.
Good thing I like blue.
Dr. Love meets with us prior to going into the lab and she is so lovely, so gentle and so reverent that she sets the tone for everyone going into what is admittedly a really rare and special experience. Dr. Love taught us about the donation program that provided the bodies we'd be studying and she led us in a moment of silence in honor of the people whose bodies we would be learning from and with that, in we go.
The lab is a big square room with frosted windows, lots of fluorescent lighting, there are concrete floors and it's really cold in there just like it is in a hospital surgery suite.
The bodies, and there a ton of them, are on rolling tables, they're all in blue plastic bags and the body, the individual cadaver that is the one we will be working on will be covered but the blue plastic bag will be unzipped and tucked in around the perimeter of the table, all rolled out of the way.
There are chairs for us to sit on if we have problems standing on the hard cold concrete floor. We gather around the table and Dr. Love prepares us for the removal of the moist wrap that she will gently pull away from the body so that we can see it for the first time. She tells us that she will keep the face covered and that usually makes it a bit easier for people who are on the edge.
Once we were gathered around the gurney of the body we were studying, I lost all track of what seemed like a sea of blue plastic bags, all different sizes, that were strewn around the lab.
I'd worn enough layers and wore thick vibram soled shoes so I wasn't cold.
Dr. Love prepares us all along the way for what's going to happen next and she goes really slowly so that nothing happens without us being prepared and ready. She prepares us before she slowly removes the moist covering that lays directly on the body, and then, there it is, a human body.
Our classroom for the next several hours.
One of the cadavers we worked on was still being dissected so not all of the muscles had been cut all the way away. As Dr. Love lifts the front of the belly through the various layers, we eventually get to the abdominal cavity (which, after seeing it in person, I call the kitchen junk drawer of the human body) and we get to see and feel each organ as Dr. Love unpacks it on our way to the back wall of the abdomen. Thrilling!
One thing you may not be aware of and it's something that can be traumatizing if you're not prepared for it is that depending on how the person died, they may still show signs of the trauma.
The female cadaver we worked on suffered a fatal stroke and fell; her knees and forehead were still bruised and cut. But what I'll always remember first and last about her is not the trauma of her death but something that has to do with her life and who she was.
What I'll always remember about her is her beautiful hands and her ruby red nail polish. She cared about herself and she cared about how she looked right down to her fingertips and, literally, until the very last day of her life, she got up, she got herself together and she presented her most beautiful self to the world and everyone in it. God bless her.
Sometimes, we spend forever with the remnants of an injury but beyond a certain point, it doesn't matter about the injury. Death unites us all and how we die, although the subject of much obsession while we are alive, becomes a virtual non-issue once we have in fact died. It doesn't matter. It doesn't.
It especially doesn't matter in the lab; in the lab, it's all about education.
And in the lab, before you know it you've got your gloved hands buried in intestines, feeling the remnants of the last meal, inspecting flecks of dried blood that have fallen from veins that were missed by embalming and every single piece - every one - is saved in a bucket that's kept under the table and every single piece - every one - is returned to the family when the body exits the program. Such respect.
When it comes time to turn the body over so we can work on the backside, Dr. Love asks us to leave the room for her to do the flip on her own. Seeing that can be upsetting and the whole process around this class is designed to minimize things that might be hard to handle.
The spinal cord is kept separate from the body and I'm pretty sure Dr. Love retrieved it from a small cooler. I held it and I also held the brain and I held the lungs and I got to touch a bunch of other stuff, too, and the whole time, people were asking questions and I was correlating what Dr. Love said to various Pilates exercises and before you know it, it's time to put that cadaver back together and take a short break during which time Dr. Love will prepare the second cadaver for us to study - of the opposite sex from the one we started with - and when we're back from our short break, we do it all again.
The male cadaver we worked on died of lung cancer and so did my dad and I had some questions for Dr. Love about that. Other folks asked all sorts of things that were somehow personally relevant to them. Dr. Love answered everything. She also taught us about how sometimes the cause of death on the death certificate isn't at all what they actually died of. Fascinating!
And when it's done, here's what will happen.
You'll never be the same.
You'll be way better than you ever were.
You'll be a better teacher.
You'll be a better cook.
You'll be a better person.
Many things changed after I took the class.
For example, I see bodies much more analytically. I can see movements in joints where as before my eye was buffered by soft tissue. I can teach my clients about how things connect, telling them that I've held it, I've squeezed it, I've moved it around, that it's just like something else they will be familiar with. I've been able to make the insides of us more familiar to us in a way I never could before.
You'll be able to do all that and more.
The differences between this class and FAMI are many and significant; there are also some commonalities.
FAMI is slick, big, formulaic and wonderful, the lectures that fill the mornings are fabulous and you will learn an absolute ton. But, the anatomy labs at FAMI are nowhere near as transforming as it is to work on a complete body. The anatomy labs at FAMI are parts of bodies, laid out on tables, sometimes in trays, and you move in groups of 15+ people from table to table every 10 minutes or so to hear the table host - a doctor, a med student - describe what you're seeing. You can touch. You can ask. But they're parts of bodies. Dry parts. They look cured. No chemical smells. No fluids.
FAMI is about $1000 tuition and 4 days in New York adds up to about another $1000. With airfare and meals, Heidi and I spent about $3500 on FAMI.
For me, here's the bottom line: Our bodies as we know them now, and as we work with them now, are whole. And there's a huge gap between seeing and handling body parts laid out on a table, dry and solid, and seeing and handling a body that's still in one piece and relatively supple.
Go to FAMI. Go more than once. Go as often as you can. You'll always get something out of it. But still try to gain access to the type of class I've arranged at Bastyr.
The difference is huge.
You deserve the full experience.
Lastly, the fool proof way to tell if you can handle a cadaver class is a pretty easy stress assessment. Reading about it, is your heart pounding out of your chest? Have your sweat glands fired fast and hard? Do you feel a little shakey? If any of that is happening, you'll be on the ragged edge in this class and you need to know that it's okay if you can't make it, if you can't stay, if you never even go in the room. It's fine. You're still a rock star. You are.
Sometimes, the biggest gain comes from trying. Sometimes, the best thing to do is wait. Only you know the right thing to do.
If you want more information or to talk about any aspect of this or anything else, call me.
I'm never far from the phone and I'm always expecting your call.