I'd suspected as much when I had trouble finding and isolating her muscles, even more when I saw the condition of her lymph nodes. Even my instructor and the lab assistant commented on the fact that she seemed to be 1) exceptionally wimpy, even for a young cat, 2) put together weird, and 3) diseased. But it was the blood vessels that really drove it home.
Veins tend to develop differently, but in Gizmo's case, even the arteries were a bit off. The latex dye injection hadn't quite gone off right with the arteries either. But, I've loved cats for their peculiarities before, so this certainly wasn't going to stop me, though it wasn't inspiring joy-joy feelings.
The blood vessels were where I really started having trouble. There's a lot of them, and the shark and cat use naming conventions that are almost (but not quite) identical. It's enough to make you want to slit your wrists (down not across ... down not across) if the thought of doing so didn't prompt a perverse desire to rattle off the names of all the vessels that branch off along the way.
It was during this time, as I mentioned, that I really grokked the fact that I was dissecting a cat. Based on her condition, I suspect she led a short and not terribly happy life. Then again, when I adopted Sasha, she too was a bit sickly (she'd just been wormed and was fighting off an upper respiratory tract infection).
The strange thing is, the increasing thoughts of Gizmo as a once-living, breathing, purring ball of fluff didn't sadden me at all. Instead, I was struck with an increasing sense of awe. Gizmo's species' evolution from a simple aquatic filter-feeder, and her own development from an embryo quite similar to that in form and function, was miraculous: elegant, intricate, clever, sometimes even amusingly obtuse.
If you're expecting this led to a sudden faith in God, you're mistaken. Quite the opposite. Instead I became even more thoroughly convinced that no simple sentient being, no matter how intelligent or powerful, could be responsible. Only the massively parallel efforts of countless organisms evolving together over billions of years could achieve something of this magnitude.
And then, just because the timing was perfect, I got sick.