Alien Pig

Went off inside a big silver bird to test the medical device I’m writing the software for.

New experience for me. Not the silver bird. That was not new. It was simply claustrophobically cramped.

No. What was new was the operating room.

It was a Saturday and quiet. … Too quiet.

Well, they don’t do cadavers-for-students on weekends so there wasn’t much going on.

Didn’t know quite what to expect.

Walked in to find a pig flipped on his back, stretched out, belly shaved, very pale skin all around, various operating room pipes and gizmos hooked to his mouth, feet and … hands. Respirator wheezing rythmically. Heart monitor beeping in tune.

This upside down pig don’t look like a pig snorting around in a pen. No visual connection to that sort of pig at all. What this guy looked like was a sympathetic Hollywood alien readied for … ah … examination … by the evil government scientists hidden away in their secret underground lab.

He didn’t survive.

But it’s all in a good cause. And, pictures of slices of an earlier test showed – bacon. Well, it’s from a pig, so what do you expect!

Sometime in to the day, I pulled out the camera and was about to capture the creepiness. “No cameras! You can’t have cameras in the operating room.” Uh, and that video camera and thermographic camera are … what? It was explained: You can take close-in pictures of the target site, but you can’t take wholistic pictures that show the animal. (Ah, so that’s why meat is hermetically sealed in nitro-packs in the supermarket.) Why no animal pics to show context, one might ask? Silly question. Think: Lawsuits. Pictures on the internet. Animal rights “people”. Yeah, only in America, where food comes from the grocery shelf. Hmmm. When was the last time you heard the once common, rhetoric statement, “It’s a free country.”?

So, the bad news was that the device didn’t seem to work. Jury’s still out on that, though. Too many new things were tested for a bottom line to be clear right now.

I learned at least one thing new: Animals don’t bleed. Not like humans, anyway. One theory is that, lacking hands, they can’t bleed like we do. No hands to stop the blood. So, do chimps bleed like a “stuck pig?”

Another question: If the pig were turned in to bacon, would the bacon have some of the anethesia in it? Some of the “we have about 20 different anethesias to mix and match from” chemicals?

Answer to “Why use so many anethethia chemicals?” Some are fast, but wear off quickly. Some are slow and last. Some depress certain parts of the body but not others. Heart or lungs, which do you want to be affected most? Etc. Pretty snazzy what knowledge and gizmos and skills are available in this modern world. Heck, slap two or three “greats” on to “grand” and you’re in a world of “drink a lot of this booze and chomp on this leather, buddy. Good luck to you.” Golly, Mr. Swine almost had it good the day we entered his life.