There is a risk of death associated with donating a piece of liver. It's about one in 500 for the risk of death. The risk of death of donating a kidney is about one in 3000, so this is a riskier operation than donating a kidney. The stakes are usually higher for the recipient of the transplant because unlike kidney failure, where you have a dialysis machine, in liver failure we don't have that kind of machine that allows a patient to survive until they can get a cadaver organ.
Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.
The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.
Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.
The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.
To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.
The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.
But I'm concerned about security. ” My response to that is simple: “Security is for cadavers.
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.
The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.
Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.
I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wondering poets!
Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.
You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.
