GROSS Anatomy with a CART captioner
Hello, again!! I’m so excited to share my second “blog.” Just to introduce myself again, my name is Jenn Porto. I’ve been a CART captioner for approximately 7 years. My purpose of writing my stories is to share my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants moments that I encounter on the job. This post doesn’t make me an expert and does not mean that I’ll always make the right decisions. I may say/do something that makes you wince. I’m okay with that. There is no rule book for being a CART captioner. With that said, I am not always going to be grammatically correct. This is an account of my day and my thoughts as they come to mind.
8/22/14 — Please do not read while eating or if you have a weak stomach. (Intrigued yet?)
I feel like I can say that I’ve realtime captioned (RTC’d) almost every type of job. I’ve captioned nude models for an art class — I’ll write about that another day – and, as of yesterday, cadavers for a GROSS anatomy class, emphasis on the GROSS. Before walking into the room, I had no idea as to how I was going to emotionally handle this class. I’ve never actually seen a dead body. I emailed the captioner who captioned the Wednesday portion of the class. She said it was no walk in the park. I worried because I’ve always been a bit gaggy. Would I cry thinking about the cadaver as a person that just passed? All I could picture was a human-sized frog, lying in its slimy bath of stinky formaldehyde. I could picture the brownish-pink intestines we had to dissect in our 8th grade bio class. Okay, I digress before I lose some of you.
Let me set the scene, the student has a mild hearing loss – this is not a professional diagnosis, just my little brain making an assessment based on how tied to my captions she appeared to be. She told me before the class that she didn’t need my captions during the dissection. “Thank gawd,” I woohoo’d inside my head. She asked if I could sit in the corner and take “notes” for her. “No prob.” The student’s wish is my command.
Before the class, my boyfriend and I had actually been strategizing about captioning in this environment; for instance, how I could prevent dissection fluids from getting on my equipment? I know this all sounds really gross, but it was a genuine topic of discussion. Should I put my laptop in a plastic bag? I can’t imagine if I shorted out my laptop and had to call in a claim to my insurance carrier Marsh USA.
I had come prepared with my normal RTC equipment, including my Dell 15″ laptop, Stenograph Mira, 6’ extension cord, laptop stand, mini 7”x10” laptop, et cetera. I use a free program called Team Viewer to mirror the image of my laptop to the mini-laptop. What I had NOT brought with me is a bubble from which I could caption inside of.
First off, I walked into the room and saw the four bodies. “EWE-ewe-ewe. Hmmmm – Wait. It’s kinda cool — really cool.” The flesh had a visible texture of pale nude-colored human jerky. It looked like a manikin from a Knott’s Scary Farm prop. Honestly, it didn’t look real at all. The smell, well, formaldehyde is no longer used in the preservation process. The bodies had a slight chemical smell that I was able to diffuse with a little Vix Vapor Rub smeared ALLLLLL over my nose.
The group of students crowded around Body No. 1. I did my best to caption from my designated corner. Hearing the group was tough. Words like sacrospinous, triceps coccyx, and planter fasciae lata, to name a few, came up while they dissected the sciatica. It was hard to hear because half of the group had their back to me and the other half were looking down at the body. Even though she had asked me to just take notes, I set my laptop up facing her. I used a black screen with yellow letters, Arial font, size 34, so the font was big enough that if she needed the captions, she could glance over her shoulder. I did notice that my student stole many glances of my captions. Next Friday, I’m going to set up my mini-laptop on the opposite side of her. With the two laptops, she will have two viewing spots in the room.
After Body No. 1 was dissected, the class moved to Body No. 2. I could no longer hear from my designated corner, so I decided to sneak a quick look at Body No. 1. From where I had been sitting, I couldn’t see the body’s face. Although, when I stood up, I could now see eyelashes on the man’s face. Until this moment, it was not a man, it was just a body. I started to see features. Feeling myself losing my cool, I looked down at the man’s hands. His fingernails looked like a werewolf’s claws. They were a couple centimeters thick, grayish, and longer than a man would wear his nails. “Sit down,” I commanded myself.
After sitting, I focused on my editing. Every couple minutes, I’d look over at the bodies, but only to make sure the student was still okay with her original desire for me to take notes instead of captioning. By the way, when I say “notes,” I mean I was captioning just like I normally would, but the student was not reading from my screen.
Unfortunately, my lunch break is directly after this class. (Yeahhhhh,my sentiments exactly.) I bought a salad from the commissary. Even though it didn’t have any meat, I found that I had lost my appetite while munching on my mixture of lettuce, beets, and celery. I wished for a shower. I felt as if I had a layer of body-preserving chemicals all over me. ICK! This was my first time captioning in such an ick-infested environment. Stay tuned for next week. I’m sure I’ll come up with solutions to the ick. All in all, it was just another day in the most rewarding career I could ever hope for.
Oh, and just one more thought, thank you so very much for all of your positive comments and thoughtful responses to my last blog.
Happy Saturday to you all!
