When Surgery was in Session

 

We knew it was coming. The dreaded frog dissection! Mr. Friedman’s announcement that spring day during my junior year was met with a moment of uncomfortable silence. The lone exception was Marcia who immediately objected on moral grounds. Mr. Friedman explained that the frog dissection was a learning experience as well as a high school science tradition. However, his surprise and unease were obvious.

            Marcia was an extremely bright girl and had been Mr. Friedman’s star pupil the entire year. His respect and admiration for this promising young lady was always apparent. I admired her too, but from a distance. Although I had never interacted with her, I easily recognized her intellect and solid grasp of biology.

            Like Marcia I too had reservations about the use of animals for scientific study. Nevertheless, I made an immediate decision that I was going to brave it out and do my utmost best. Throughout high school I felt at home with History and English, but was far less proficient in Math and Science, especially Biology. All those terms such as amino acids, osmosis, and diffusion. Lots of confusion! They were just scattered words to me with no clear meaning or connections. And forget about those structural formulas. I couldn’t tell one from the other.

            In second grade my teacher, Miss Meyer, gave me an E (for Excellent) in science, mainly because I had brought in a toy boat for show-and-tell and spoke in “Secondgradeese” about floatation and propulsion. It was all downhill from there. In the years that followed I bungled my way through science activities and projects, and I was really lost in seventh grade electric shop. For a few years there I was “asleep at the wheel” when it came to science.

            Then, I rediscovered science as a high school Freshman. It was little more than a science appreciation class. Everyone passed with flying colors just by having good attendance and showing interest. My sophomore year started well with Chemistry thanks in part to my wonderful lab coat wearing sweetheart of a teacher, Mrs. Altman, who bore a striking resemblance to Jane Wyatt, the actress from the 1950s T.V. show “Father Knows Best.” Unfortunately for me, Mrs. Altman was not also my LAB teacher. Mine possessed a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. He was a stand-up comedian one minute and a cold-blooded stiff the next. My dislike of him was cemented and my turn away from Chemistry began the day he humiliated me by tearing up my incomplete LAB homework right in front of my face with my classmates looking on. On the surface I showed no reaction, but deep down inside I was deeply hurt. I had given it my best shot and an incomplete paper was all that I could muster at the time. In fact, things seldom seemed to go as intended whenever I did LAB work. I’d follow directions as best I could and still manage to botch up the experiment. My grades slowly started to slip with Mrs. Altman, as did my command of Chemistry. That is why I decided that day in Biology that I was going to perform the frog dissection and I was going to get it right.

            A few days after his initial announcement, Mr. Friedman reminded us once again of the upcoming frog dissection. He probably hoped that by this time Marcia would have changed her mind. No such luck. He explained how the use of animals had contributed to many breakthroughs in medicine. Marcia still wouldn’t budge. Mr. Friedman was clearly disappointed, but he had to respect her decision and move on.

            On the day before the big event Marcia bombarded Mr. Friedman with a series of last- minute questions. Would the frogs be dead or alive? Were they alive when they were brought to school? Would the students have to kill them? Would they suffer? With each question Mr. Friedman paused and gave an honest answer. He then described the quick, yet gruesome procedure in which the frogs were euthanized. Any chance that Marcia would have a change of heart ended at that moment. Mr. Friedman’s strategy of total honesty had not succeeded.

 

            For the frog dissection each student was paired with a classmate. My partner was Rodney, like me a mediocre Biology student- average at best. Rodney and I had been classmates back in third grade at P.S. 122 when schools were integrated through busing. He rode the school bus from the Queensbridge Housing Project in Long Island City while I walked to school from Marine Terrace apartments right there in Astoria. Back then Rodney had been a bit of a class clown with a loud bellowing laugh. By high school he had mellowed and matured, and now spoke with a subdued baritone voice that reminded me of Barry White, the early disco era soul singer, songwriter, musician. Our pairing proved to be a perfect match.

            With Marcia observing, the class received dissecting and safety tools. We pinned our frogs’ limbs to the examination pans and performed a visual exam under Mr. Friedman’s direction. Using the scalpel, Rodney performed the initial incision in the frog’s lower abdomen between its hind legs. I completed the task with surgical scissors to form an “I” pattern. With complete concentration we carefully pulled back and secured the camouflage skin and peritoneum, a spider-web like membrane. Like highly trained medical school professors we identified the major internal organs. Rodney provided the real time narrative in his cool calm Barry White baritone voice, minus the Love Unlimited Orchestra.

            Rodney and I then performed the actual dissection. Maintaining our laser beam focus we took turns delicately cutting and extracting the noddle-like fat bodies, the easy to locate brown liver, and the small reddish three ventricle heart. Then, with the precise precision of top-notch surgeons we used our surgical scissors and tweezers to cut and remove the stomach, small intestine, and harder to pinpoint bean shaped kidneys. Having missed an earlier clue, the frog’s broad fingers, I concluded that our specimen was a male, based on the absence of eggs. Rodney concurred. I assume that we completed a LAB report which most likely entailed labeling a frog diagram, thus earning us a decent grade. The surgery was a success!

My success that day was a well needed confidence booster that lifted my spirits at a crucial moment. It was around this time that my mother, who had not been feeling well, became seriously ill with leukemia. The next twelve months were painful and disorienting. My mother did not live to see me graduate.

 

Fast Forward about forty-five years. I was in my final year as a teacher and was now substituting at P.S. 122, my elementary school alma mater. On one occasion I filled in for a science teacher in the middle of a biology unit with gifted eighth graders. Having no advance preparation, I miraculously explained with confidence the various organelles and life processes of plant and animal cells, some of the same terms and concepts I had once struggled with. I was amazed at my own command of the subject matter.  It was magical! And to top it all off the principal came in to observe me. There I was standing tall teaching biology with a sense of authority while giddily laughing to myself. The whole scene just struck me as funny.

I sometimes wonder what became of Mr. Friedman, Marcia, and especially Rodney.    Mr. Friedman may still be with us. He was a relatively young teacher at the time. I would love to share this story with them- my recollection of when surgery was in session.   

Steve T.