serendipti's Diaryland Diary

1:09 a.m. - Monday, May. 15, 2006

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

forensic path day 1

i had a long and busy crazy day. the first 3 hours of the day were spent suppressing my gag reflex in the medical examiners office. Good to know cranial nerves IX and X are intact. I also sawed open a skull and scooped the brain out and then fit it back like a puzzle piece and sewed it pack up, sans brain, as if it never happened, the whole cut open skull and brain removal part. I was unable to sleep last night, so excited was I to go to this rotation, and by the end of the morning, as I fought back the nausea and light headedness, I thought, only 7 more days of this. I could deal if it were not for the smells. You know how you can sometimes go on vacation or leave your house for a long time, and come back, and much to your horror, the house stinks because you did not take out the kitchen trash. So then you take it out, but you have leaky fermented trash juice dripping at the bottom of the bag. And so you take that smell, and add in the sour stench of bile and the guttery buttery odor of feces, and that is what the place smells like when you open up the abdomens and thoraces of these freshly dead. And then you remove, one by, one, each organ. Weigh, examine, and then systematically slice ( I was told to use the term 'dissect'....but as far as i am concerned, there is a metal sink, a white chop board, a long shiny knife, and a piece of meat being cut symmetrically, with butcher like precision, which may or may not be precise depending on who you talk to..so anyway.I will stick with slice.) And so you slice, and then all the organ debris that you don't need, which you never really need more than a bit, is stuffed into a big red biohazard bag, and then once the body cavity is hosed off and 'clean,' you take this bag o organs and stuff the big red trashbag back into the body, and then sew it back up.
It is late. I want to go into way more mad detail. But I wanted to write my first impressions while they are fresh. I was shaken this afternoon and took refuge at my friend Megan's apt, where we pigged out on these awesome tacos we made, but not before I took a scalding shower to try to scrub the dead out of my pores.
I was pretty overwhelmed by my first 3 hours at the medical examiners. I will write more tomorrow, when I can concentrate on something more than the smell, and how to describe it to you, and hopefully I will be prepared for the smells, so I can be more observant and ask more questions.
I spent the last couple hours in a bar with two of my boys from high school, and there is much to write about wrt to some of the conversations we had, and too bad I am rank with the smell of second hand smoke. viva chicago.

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

previous - next