Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [15]
Maddie had come to Gloucestershire from Wales with no ties and, since Luke is not the controlling type, we were able to go for a drink after work whenever we felt like it in order to catch up; in this way our friendship grew. That night, I was overwhelmed by what I had seen over the past week or so with Mr Patterson and bent Maddie’s ear about it for the first part of the evening. We had gone to the closest pub to the hospital, but as the evening moved on, it started to become full of underage squealing teenagers so we headed to a place we had discovered in town called The Firestone, an old bar with a modern relaxed feel. They had got it right with this bar when they redesigned it – neutral colours with dark furniture; not huge leather sofas that you just wanted to curl up and sleep on, but sensible drinking furniture, and nothing too soft or too high. We managed to get what was becoming our regular table by the window so we could watch the sights walking by and comment on the usual collection of fashion disasters. Maddie and I were smartly dressed in work clothes so we felt entitled to criticize. We stayed until throwing out time, and then took a taxi back to mine to annoy the neighbours with some loud music and more drinking.
EIGHT
Clive felt that first thing the next Monday morning I should start to eviscerate. I had been handling the organs while doing the weights for the pathologists, so I knew what sort of textures and smells to expect. This was going to be very different though, and I was nervous.
I stood there that Monday morning, in my scrubs, almost shaking. In front of me lay a little old lady, totally unclothed, waiting for me to start the process that would reveal to her family why she actually died. This was the first time that I had worked with Clive in the post-mortem room. Being the senior technician, Clive was responsible for training the new technicians in their evisceration technique, but he had little time for everyday post-mortems due to being tied up in the office with paperwork; that was what Graham and I were employed to do. He went through some basic anatomy which went over my head; all I could think about was how the hell I was ever going to do this. I had seen Graham do it plenty of times, but he was a dab hand; this was about to be very real for me. I was going to open up someone’s mother, grandmother, sister, aunt. And then, was I going to be able to get out the organs intact, or was I going to slice and dice them all into an unrecognizable mess so the pathologist would not be able to work with them?
None of this seemed to matter to Clive, as he encouraged me to place the PM40 onto the body. As I did this, Clive said I had to push down harder on the knife; I needed to cut the skin, not scratch it. As I put pressure on the blade, I could feel it bump across the bone in the middle of the ribs which, I was to learn, is called the sternum. As I reached the bottom of this, Clive suddenly informed me that I now had to take the pressure off the knife. Without even thinking, I pulled the knife up and away from the body. I was a bit shocked by the quick instruction from Clive and felt I had made a horrible mistake. He went on to say that I had to be careful at the lower end of the sternum as the stomach and intestines lie just under, and it is quite easy to put the blade through them, thereby causing a spillage of contents which not only would be messy and unpleasant, but also might be required for testing by the pathologist. Clive went on to explain in great detail about the mess and smell this causes, and I got the feeling he was more bothered about that aspect than losing the stomach contents for the pathologist.
I eventually managed