Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [72]
‘So, she drank herself to death?’ suggested Maddie.
He thought about this. ‘That’s possible, and she does smell of alcohol, but acute ethanol poisoning is quite rare and, if it’s an experienced drinker, needs a fantastically high alcohol level – I’ve known cases where people have six or seven times the legal limit for driving in their blood, and they’re still walking around, far from pushing up daisies.’
‘Then why’s she dead?’
‘Well, if I can find nothing else to have done it, I’ll have to assume that it was SUDCA.’
She threw me a look and I shrugged my shoulders back to her. I had seen cases of this before and knew what Ed was talking about, but it wasn’t my place to explain to her so I played dumb. He continued, ‘Sudden Unexplained Death in Chronic Alcoholism. Some people who drink a lot for a long time just drop down dead.’
Maddie, who had had a skinfull the weekend before and had come in on Monday morning looking like she’d spent the night in a tomb, looked slightly alarmed. ‘Why?’
‘No one knows. It might be ketoacidosis, it might hypoglycaemia, it might be asphyxia due to an epileptic fit.’
‘So how can you prove that’s what it was?’
He smiled. ‘I can’t. If there’s nothing else that might have killed her, then I have to make that assumption.’
She frowned. ‘That’s not very good.’
He laughed. ‘No, it’s not, Maddie. Sometimes, death is just as unsatisfactory as life.’
In the pub, after Ed had got our second and last drinks, he said, ‘The thing about alcohol is that everyone assumes it kills you just by causing cirrhosis, but it’s a lot more subtle than that. Cirrhosis is bad, believe me – it alone can cause gastrointestinal haemorrhage, liver failure, kidney failure, or brain toxicity – but that just touches the surface. Today we’ve had a case where it killed someone because they spent the night out in the open – alcohol causes dilatation of the peripheral capillaries and increases heat loss – and someone who almost certainly had a huge binge and then died as they started to sober up. It can cause acute pancreatitis, heart disease, cancer and dementia.’ He paused. ‘You know, one of the first cases I did when I came here was a young chap who went out on the lash, took a shortcut across the park and saw the last bus just turning the corner up ahead. In order to run to catch it, he jumped over a low wall. It was only about two foot high – on his side. On the other side, there was an eight-foot drop to the pavement. He broke both ankles and smashed his skull. He had five times the driving limit for alcohol in his blood.’
‘Scary stuff I said.
He shrugged. ‘You’re going to die of something,’ he pointed out. ‘Even teetotallers drop down dead unexpectedly – in fact, they’re more likely to do so than people who drink in moderation. So really, it’s not all bad. You need something to ease the rigours of the day, but everything in moderation, Michelle.’
‘Thank God,’ I said, thinking of the glass of Merlot I was planning to pour down my throat that evening while Luke cooked my supper.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Mrs Georgina Dellaway was a seventy-eight-year-old woman who had three daughters and, between those, eleven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. When I first saw her, she looked like a nice kindly old lady with a smile on her face even though she’d been shut in the fridges over the weekend. She had been a school dinner lady for most of her working life, becoming a lollipop lady when she retired.
She was the last person you would expect to blow something up, but blow something up she did.
To be fair to Mrs Dellaway, it wasn’t entirely her fault because poor Maddie had a hand in it too.
Mrs Dellaway died on the ward in the hospital and everything seemed straightforward, so no one had any idea what was going to happen. She had apparently come in short of breath and the doctors had diagnosed a chest infection. They had started antibiotics but she also had heart disease and this had got worse. After two days, the doctors had called in the daughters and told them that the situation was hopeless.