Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [22]
But I realized then that this was how it was going to be. No deliberate surprises, just things as nature intended them to be – its own way of disposing of a body if the person was unlucky enough to die on their own and not be found. This did not put me off the job, but did make my skin crawl and the smell catching the back of my throat made me retch. Since I did not want to run from the mortuary screaming, I dealt with it and told myself again and again that it would get easier with experience.
Clive asked if I was OK and began to tell me how he had seen six-foot males brought to the floor by such sights. He did not elaborate on this, but I was beginning to learn that Clive liked to drip feed you only little bits of information at a time. So we left it at that and I stood back as Graham wheeled the trolley past me to take the body through to the post-mortem room. The body was transferred over to the PM table, left in its bags, door closed behind it and we all returned to the office for the coffee that we were going to have originally, while we waited for the pathologist to arrive. After a while, though, the smell of the rotting body seemed to be getting worse, so I asked Clive if it was all right to go out for some fresh air. Graham came with me and after ten minutes it was time to face it again. When we returned Dr Burberry was having a coffee with Clive in the office and merrily regaling him with the news that the stench of the decomposed body was wafting through the whole lab above us, and the staff were complaining once again. It was far, far worse than Mr Patterson and, at the time, I truly believed I would never have to experience worse.
How wrong I was, though.
Having identified the body from the labels attached, Ed told Graham he could get on with the evisceration, and he went back upstairs to continue reporting surgical pathology specimens from living patients. Graham and I put on our scrubs, after which I stood in the background watching. From what Neville at the Coroner’s office had said, it turned out that this person was female and had, in the prime of her life, been a GP. As she got older, the GP side came racing back to the surface and, thinking she knew better than other doctors and could self-diagnose, she refused any help from her own family doctor. Because she had no next of kin, and because she was a private woman with no friends, this had led to isolation and she had subsequently died a lonely death without being discovered for – as I was eventually to learn – a couple of weeks. Graham then went on to tell me how we were lucky it was late winter – if it had been summer, he said with a wink, she would have been a lot worse. My initial reaction was to wonder just how she could possibly get a lot worse.
As Graham rolled the lady out of the bag, it was evident that she was fully dressed and her legs were wrapped in a blanket. This blanket had stuck to her body due to decomposition and it, too, was gently moving. As Graham pulled it back, another writhing ocean of maggots was exposed, more than I could ever have imagined in one place. I was not able to stomach any more at that point and was excused from the room. I ventured back into the office, where Clive was sitting at the computer on his desk. ‘Too much for you?’ he asked with that half-smile I was starting to know so well. I guess the fact that I was ashen and holding my breath at intervals to stop myself heaving gave the game away.
I was embarrassed, and thought this would be the end of my career as a Medical Technical Officer, but when, after ten minutes, I returned to the dissection room