Tonight at Wayne State’s impact lab, a cadaver shoulder impact is taking place, and King has been gracious enough to invite me to watch.
Actually, he didn’t invite me. I asked if I could watch, and he agreed to it.
Still, considering what I’ll be seeing and how sensitive the public is to these things and further considering that Albert King has read my writing and knows it doesn’t exactly read like The International Journal of Crashworthiness, he was pretty darn gracious.
Wayne State has been involved in impact research since 1939, longer than any other university. On the wall above the landing of the front stairs of the Bioengineering Center a banner proclaims: “Celebrating 50 Years of Moving Forward with Impact.” It is 2001, which suggests that for twelve years now, no one has thought to take down the banner, which you kind of expect from engineers.
King is on his way to the airport, so he leaves me with fellow bioengineering professor John Cavanaugh, who will be overseeing tonight’s impact. Cavanaugh looks at once like an engineer and a young Jon Voight, if that’s possible. He has a laboratory complexion, pale and unlined, and regular-looking brown hair. When he talks or shifts his glance, his eyebrows rise and his forehead draws together, giving him a more or less permanent look of mild worry. Cavanaugh brings me downstairs to the impact lab. It is a typical university lab, with ancient, jerry-rigged equipment and decor that runs to block-lettered safety reminders. Cavanaugh introduces me to Matt Mason, tonight’s research assistant, and Deb Marth, for whose Ph.D. dissertation the impact is being done, and then he disappears upstairs.
I glance around the room for UM 006, the way, as a child, I used to scan the basement for the thing that reaches through the banisters to grab your legs. He isn’t here yet. A crash test dummy sits on a sled railing. Its upper body rests on its thighs, head on knees, as though collapsed in despair. It has no arms, perhaps the source of the despair.
Matt is linking up high-speed videocameras to a pair of computers and to the linear impactor. The impactor is a formidably sized piston fired by compressed air and mounted on a steel base the size of a fairground pony. From the hallway, a sound of clattering wheels. “Here he comes,” says Deb. UM 006 lies on a gurney being wheeled by a muscular man with gray hair and rambunctious eyebrows, dressed, like Marth, in surgical scrubs.
“I am Ruhan,” says the man beneath the eyebrows. “I am the cadaver man.” He holds out a gloved hand. I wave, to show him that I’m not wearing gloves. Ruhan comes from Turkey, where he was a doctor. For a former doctor whose job now entails diapering and dressing cadavers, he has an admirably upbeat disposition. I ask him if it’s difficult to dress a dead man, and how he does it. Ruhan describes the process, then stops.
“Have you ever been to a nursing home? It’s like that.”
UM 006 is dressed this evening in a Smurf-blue leotard and matching tights. Beneath the tights he wears a diaper, for leakage. The neckline of his leotard is wide and scooped, like a dancer’s. Ruhan confirms that the cadaver leotards are purchased from a dancers’ supply house. “They would be disgusted if they knew!” To ensure anonymity, the dead man’s face is masked by a snug-fitting white cotton hood. He looks like someone about to rob a bank, someone who meant to pull pantyhose over his head but got it wrong and used an athletic sock.
Matt sets down his laptop and helps Ruhan lift the cadaver into the car seat, which sits on a table beside the impactor. Ruhan is right. It’s nursing-home work: dressing, lifting, arranging. The distance between the very old, sick, frail person and the dead one is short, with a poorly marked border. The more time you spend with the invalid elderly (I have seen both my parents in this state), the more you come to see extreme old age as a gradual easing into death. The old and the dying sleep more and more, until one day they “sleep” all the time. They often become more and more immobile until one day they can do no more than lie or sit however the last person positioned them. They have as much in common with UM 006 as they do with you and me.
I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren’t scary. The half hour I spent with my mother as a dead person was easier by far than the many hours I spent with her as a live person dying and in pain. Not that I wished her dead. I’m just saying it’s easier. Cadavers, once you get used to them—and you do that quite fast—are surprisingly easy to be around.
Which is good, because at the moment, it’s just he and I. Matt is in the next room, Deb has gone to look for something. UM 006 was a big, meaty man, still is. His tights are lightly stained. His leotard shows up his lumpy, fallen midsection. The aging superhero who can’t be bothered to wash his costume. His hands are mittened with the same cotton as his head. It was probably done to depersonalize him, as is done with the hands of anatomy lab cadavers, but for me it has the opposite effect. It makes him seem vulnerable and toddlerlike.
Ten minutes pass. Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there.
Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.
Deb is back. She is checking accelerometers that she has painstakingly mounted to exposed areas of the cadaver’s bones: on the scapula, clavicle, vertebrae, sternum, and head. By measuring how fast the body accelerates on impact, the devices essentially give you the force of the hit, as measured in g’s (gravities) . After the test, Deb will autopsy the shoulder area and catalog the damage at this particular speed. What she is after is the injury threshold and the forces needed to generate it; the information will be used to develop shoulder instrumentation for the SID, the side-impact dummy.
A side-impact accident is one in which the cars collide at ninety degrees, bumper to door, the kind that often take place at four-way intersections when one party hasn’t bothered to stop at the light or heed the stop sign.
Lap-shoulder belts and dashboard air bags are engineered to protect against the forward-heaving forces of a head-on crash; they do little for a person in a side-impact crash. The other thing working against you in this type of crash is the immediacy of the other car; there is no engine or trunk and rear seat to absorb the blow.[14] There are a couple inches of metal door. This is also the reason it took so long for side air bags to begin appearing in cars. With no hood to collapse, the sensors have to sense the impact immediately, and the old ones weren’t up to the task.
Deb knows all about this because she works as a design engineer at Ford and was the person who implemented the side air bags in the 1998 Town Car. She doesn’t look like an engineer. She has magazine-model skin and a wide, white, radiant smile and thick, shiny brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. If Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock had a child together, it would look like Deb Marth.
The cadaver before UM 006 was hit at a faster speed: 15 mph (which, were this a real side-impact accident with a passenger door to absorb some of the energy of the impact, would translate to being hit by a car going perhaps 25 or 30 mph). The impact broke his collarbone and scapula and fractured five ribs. Ribs are more important than you think.
When you breathe, you not only need to move your diaphragm to pull air into your lungs, you need the muscles attached to your’ ribs and the ribs themselves. If all your ribs break, your rib cage can’t help inflate your lungs the way it’s supposed to, and you will find it very hard to breathe.
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This is why you shouldn’t worry all that much about sitting in the middle seat, without a shoulder belt. If the car gets hit from the side, you’re better off being farther from the doors. The kindly people beside you, the ones with the shoulder belts, will absorb the impact for you.