serendipti's Diaryland Diary

9:48 pm - Tuesday, May. 16, 2006

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

forensic path day 2

today at the coroners it was a lot easier. I knew what to expect and what to brace myself for, and that made the day pleasnt and fun. I learned that the pathologist i works with doesn't mind 'decomps' (i.e. decomposed/decomposing dead bodies that are found days, weeks, months, after death......i saw a few today.....big, green, swollen, bodies, the faces blackened with decay and rot...almost looking like it was burned off....something grotesque out of a movie like night of the living dead, except these are the dead dead, the neglected dead, found by thier landlords after neighbors complained of a stench.....found by a relative after a long gap between visits......) so my attending does not mind decomps as long as they are interesting. Case in point, a body from the other day.....she said it was found in an abandoned van....lord only knows how long this body was in this van....so it was nasteriffically decomposing.....she proceeded to get seemingly sidetracked and launch into a description of maggots.....you see, maggots love blood, that is their food of choice....and if they can't get to blood directly, then they like to go to moist dampy blood like environs, like the eyeballs and nose and mouth....so most decomps will have maggots in those areas.....so this one decomp who came in had a strange concentration of maggots on his right upper arm, so forensic pathologist that she is, it was a thing that made her go, hmmm......
she digs and digs and finds a bullet......maggots love blood, that is why they were concentrated there......now she had some suspicions that there might be more to find, and on a whim, she got the head scanned.....two bullets lodged up there.....the head apparently was so oozy maloozy that you could not seen and entrance wounds, but she followed some random hunch and found all these things in a decomp. thus, her original statement, decomps are aite as long as they are interesting......just follow the maggots.
So this morning, as we got ready to 'round,' (it still trips me out that their rounding is a telling of the stories that brought these bodies to us.....details like he ate a taco and then he got sweaty....) i look over and see the young male form of a clearly indian body. And the familiarity of skin and hair made me start, but then, all of a sudden it looked like a kid I knew from the class above me. And I was like, oh jesus, oh jesus, don't do this, please don't do this....and I am breathing and trying to calm down, but then the story of this kid was that he was from a local suburb and they mentioned his age and a recent trip to india, and everything was seeming to correlate with this kid I knew, and as I tried to hold in my incipient diarrhea I kept telling myself, omigod, it is him, and at this point, I am like 6 yards from the body, but the profile is clearly outlined, and I am on the verge of losing it, but I force myself to walk over to the aluminum table and face the face straight on, just to confirm, and I thanked every single person, warm and corpse, in that room, that this was not the kid I knew.
but I almost soiled myself.
And so I was asking the doc I was working with and it turns out that happened to her a few years back, and they brought in one of her best friends from a motor vehicle accident. And she id'd him. Can you imagine? She was visibly shaken as she described to me the details of that day. Apparently, the victims closest friend and neighbor was also a doc who works there, and she was in a room bawling, because she came in and saw him with no warning.
This morning, after rotation, I was turning onto taylor ave and I thought to myself, be safe with this left turn, or else you know exactly where you are going to end up. And then as I was driving home today, I saw these motorcyclists, passenger and driver with a helmet attached to the side of the bike, but each head helmet -less (yaay illinois libertarians getting rid of the helmet laws......at least there are more potential organs to harvest from accident scenes is the flip side of this) and I watch them zoom bye and I think, I hope I don't see you in the a.m. Weird weird weird. A lot of the people who work there are news junkies, because you watch the 10 o clock news, and you have an idea of what the face of your work day looks like tomorrow, literally.
And so many of the folks that come in have been using heroin. There have been a spate of heroin related deaths recently because there is a shipment of heroin laced with fentanyl, and people are using and dying. Apparently it has gotten so bad that police are actually handing out fliers saying the heroin is deadly right now. Amazing. how we use our resources. And so almost every drug related death I have seen is a heroin one. creepy. One of the techs was talking about how in his hood the junkies actually ask for that specific heroin...yo yo you know where I can get me some of that drop-dead heroin.....they just think it means that it is more potent.....good thing those fliers are doing their job. no?
A man was sitting outside his house in his car with his girlfriend. someone came up to their window, sprayed something in her face, shot him. Enter bullet around shoulder, exit bullet inner arm, re-enter bullet side of chest, almost exit bullet other side of body....we pulled the almost exited bullet out the flank....it was shiny and gleaming in the almost-exit wound.
Next time you eat cooked and sliced beets, think of the spleen. Cuz it might as well be sliced spleen, cuz that is exactly what it looks like.
A man had a tuft of hair in his ear, and his lobe was a certain characteristic crease. the doc was like, according to doc so and so, this hair and this crease means he died of coronary artery disease. This man was youngish for that diagnosis. When we sliced open his heart, and checked the arteries, his right coronary was completely blocked. Tuft of ear hair and ear lobe crease. Creepy. Everyone has their tricks of the trade, or their superstitions.
A man who died was undocumented. When the people at his work told the cops his address, they went their and everyone says nobody by that name lives there. The fear is so great, that the undocumented don't get claimed, everyone is too afraid.
I told the pathologist that the next thing that bush is going to do is come and find her and arrest her for performing an autopsy on someone undocumented. we laughed, but the kind of humorless laugh that seems appropiate only in a morgue.
We deal with a lot of unclaimed and un id'd bodies. We keep them in this huge cavernous refrigerated storage warehouse....it is like a huge army barracks with crowded bunks except it isn't. I asked if families ever had to come to this site to ID, and apparently there is a room where the family can just see the body on a screen, via a camcorder, for ID purposes. And so the tech was like, hey doc, did you see the new plasma screen they bought? So she turns to me and she is like, yeah, it is really sad....before, the family would id the body after seeing the image on a small, black and white screen.....but now they bought this huge plasma screen, so the family can view the corpse face of their beloved on a high definition technicolor dream of a plasma screen....she sighed: now they see every detail that we see.
yaaay technology.
I learned a lot today. And I was not petrified by the fact that I was there, so I got to ask a lot of questions. This rotation is all about stories. Everyone has a ton of stories. People who work there have done so for decades and have seen all the big stories, the fires, the murders, the night club tragedy...they have seen the history of this city pass through their hands.
We had a person who was 500 pounds. The big y shaped incision you make, a v from the shoulders and the vertical through the abdomen....it took forever because of all the fat. The tech was telling me that the biggest person they had through when he was working over the last few decades was 976 lbs. A crane and a flat bed were involved in pick up and delivery.
so many stories.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next