Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [5]
Graham removed the tag, opened the bag and checked it against similar tags that were tied around the dead person’s wrist and big toe. He did this in a matter-of-fact manner, as if he had done it a thousand times before. Graham is a man of average height, with a pure white head of hair and the cheeks you get from spending a long time out of doors. Very friendly, he is full of stories about everything which he tells in a deep, cosy voice bathed in a broad Gloucestershire accent; I felt very comfortable in his company from the word go. He has no airs or graces and talks a lot about how things have changed.
When Graham opened the large white body bag containing Mr Evans, I was shocked to see what lay before me. Mr Evans was an elderly gentleman, and I expected to see a body that looked as though it was at rest. What I did see was a frail old man with head tilted back, eyes staring wide and mouth gaping open. Graham noticed straight away that I was taken aback. He explained to me about the muscles in the jaw relaxing at death and making the mouth drop open, but not about the eyes and the arched neck. At that point, Clive came into the body store and said that Mr Evans was going for autopsy, so could we take him through to the post-mortem room and put him on the middle table?
The three tables in the PM room each had a delegated technician in order of rank. Clive was on the top table, being the senior technician, and Graham on the middle one, so I figured I would be assigned the third table, lowest in the rank. Clive told us that this had become a Coroner’s case – and would therefore require an autopsy – because the death had happened a week or so after Mr Evans had been admitted to hospital after a fall at home; all deaths that might be the result of an accident come under the jurisdiction of the Coroner and therefore require a post-mortem examination. Apparently, though, such cases as these are usually straightforward. Clive informed us airily that this was probably a pulmonary embolus – a blood clot that forms usually in the leg veins and then breaks off to travel to and block the blood supply to the lungs. I looked at him blankly and he walked away chuckling, saying as he went, ‘You’ll get there.’
This was to be the only PM for the day, so Clive asked me if I would be satisfied just to go and watch Graham take the organs out of the body – eviscerate it – and then help him clean up afterwards. More than happy, I was shown into a small changing room where I dressed in blue scrubs that were three sizes too big and picked from a large selection of white clogs the pair that was closest to my size. I entered the PM room from the opposite, ‘dirty’, door in the changing room. Graham was already there and he showed me a small alcove off the main room which housed disposable hats, masks, gloves and goggles.
Not having a clue what glove size I am, I chose the smallest and then struggled with the disposable hat – I probably ended up looking like the Pope until Graham pointed me in the direction of the mirror. I found myself looking at someone out of perhaps a science fiction film or a medical soap opera; I felt really weird wearing all this protective gear and, once again, was worrying that I was out of my depth.
Graham had stripped Mr Evans and placed a wooden block under the middle of his back so the torso was raised and the spine slightly curved to expose the neck. Graham checked the identification on Mr Evans against what was written on the postmortem request. Having satisfied himself that this was the right person, he told me that identification of the body is our most important responsibility; every so often the wrong body gets eviscerated, and what follows is a tidal wave of trouble. The next of kin, not surprisingly, tend