Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [6]
Graham had a tray of instruments on the table with him, resting on Mr Evans’ legs. From this tray he took a knife; it was about the size of a table knife, but with a disposable blade that looked as though it would cut through steel. Graham placed the tip of this at the top of the torso, in the midline just below the Adam’s apple, and ran it down with a single, easy sweep to end just above the pubic hair. Sticking his fingers in a small, deeper incision that he had made in this slit just under the ribcage, he then cut down through a couple of layers of fat and muscle to expose the guts; he extended this down towards the feet so that all the abdominal organs were exposed. This done, he then began to gently retract the skin from the ribs, slicing it off with practised strokes of a knife laid flat to the ribs, so that within a couple of minutes Mr Evans’ skin was completely free of the front of his body, hanging away from it. It looked as if you would almost be able to zip him right back up.
He rinsed off his knife, which was apparently called a PM40, and replaced it in his tray. After that, he washed off any blood that was on the table, and was telling me about how some corpses ‘bleed’ more than others depending on how long they have been dead as he picked up what looked like a pair of small stainless steel garden shears. He opened them up and put the blades around the lowest of Mr Evans’ ribs on the right-hand side. He began to cut upwards, severing each rib with a crunch and then moving on up to the next until he reached the top; he did this on both sides, and thereby removed the front of the ribcage, pulling away a big triangle like a prehistoric crab. This exposed the heart, lungs and most of the liver. He placed the ‘crab’ to one side and moved down the table so that he was over Mr Evans’ bowels, which were fully exposed and waiting to be unravelled.
Next, Graham took a pair of scissors and cut through a piece of gut near the stomach. He tugged at the guts and began to unwind them, cutting as he did so through the fatty membrane that was holding them in place. Within a very few minutes, the bowels were lying in a stainless steel bowl at Mr Evans’ feet. While Graham was doing what he had done a hundred times before, I started to notice the smell. I stood thinking of what it reminded me of. Graham told me how he used to work in a slaughterhouse, and then it hit me. The smell was almost the same as in the butcher’s. By the time I had gathered my thoughts, Graham had loosened the remaining organs from the back of the opened torso – although I missed how he had done it – and he now had his PM40 up inside Mr Evans’ throat, busily working away under the skin, pushing the blade into the floor of the mouth. After a few moments he had cut through this and around the back of the tongue so that he was able to free the mouth and neck organs. What he did then was like some sort of gory magic trick; he pulled the tongue down through the throat, everything still intact, and then he continued to pull everything away from the spine – lungs, heart, liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys . . . It amazed me then – and still amazes me now – how all the organs are attached to each other.
By doing this, he had released all Mr Evans’ organs from his body, and was now holding what he told me was referred to as the ‘pluck’. Grasped firmly in Graham’s hand were Mr Evans’ neck structures, his tongue resting on Graham’s hand while suspended below was every other major organ except the gut and the brain. He placed all this in a second stainless steel bowl, and placed both of the bowls on the dissection bench ready for the pathologist. Graham got cleaned up and we both took off our protective equipment, changed into clean scrubs and went back to the office for