Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [73]
They knew the cause of death and a death certificate had been written by the doctors, stating that Mrs Dellaway had died of bronchopneumonia with ischaemic heart disease as a contributory factor. The family decided that they would like her to be cremated and, in accordance with the law, cremation papers had to be filled out and signed; as far as the hospital staff are concerned, this means that one of the doctors who looked after the deceased certifies that they are happy the death was natural, and an independent but experienced doctor then makes inquiries to ensure this is, in fact, the case. Sometimes this whole process can be protracted – the next of kin may even complain to the Trust chief executive – but in the case of Mrs Dellaway there was no problem at all. Everything sailed through. Accordingly, just two days after her death Mrs Dellaway was picked up by the undertakers, and, as far as we were concerned, we had done our job and done it very well. She had left our care and we moved on to others.
We found out fairly quickly that Mrs Dellaway had exploded in the crematorium. Clive, Maddie and I were sitting in the office at about three o’clock the next day, just having got the dissection room clean after three PMs and Peter Gillard spraying blood about like air freshener, when the phone rang. Clive answered and was very soon holding the phone away from his ear because whoever it was was giving him a right royal bollocking. He looked across at us as this was going on and the expression on his face told me immediately that serious shit was happening. Eventually, he managed to squeeze a few words in. ‘Look, I’m really sorry, Dave . . .’ Dave Mansard, the manager at the local crematorium, hadn’t finished, though. As Clive held the phone away from his ear again, we could hear for ourselves that Dave was not the happiest of bunnies.
Eventually, Clive put the phone down and his face told of someone who was seriously out of sorts. With barely contained anger he asked of Maddie and me, ‘Who checked out Mrs Dellaway?’
It took a few moments for the two of us to get our brains in gear. ‘It was me, I think,’ said Maddie nervously.
‘Did you follow the protocol?’ he asked. His voice was dangerously calm.
‘Of course,’ replied Maddie at once, and full of confidence.
‘Then would you mind explaining,’ asked Clive, ‘why she just exploded and did God knows how much damage to the crematorium?’
The point is that when our patients come into the mortuary, they are liable to have had all sorts of things done to them, and all sorts of things put into them, and some of these have consequences even after they have passed away. On the whole, fillings, artificial hips and knees, and most of the ironmongery that surgeons put in are fine and the fire of the crematorium doesn’t touch them; they’re left among the ashes to be retrieved by the crematorium staff. Pacemakers, though, are different. Pacemakers, when heated to the temperature of the fires at the crematorium, explode, and it’s not a muffled little affair, either. They go BANG and will easily damage the walls of the furnace. Not only that, but can you imagine the distress of the deceased’s nearest and dearest when, just as they are filing out of the chapel saying their thank-yous to the vicar, there is a loud explosion, the ground rocks and things fall off the walls of the vestry? Not surprisingly they are perturbed and, when they discover that Uncle Alf hasn’t so much been cremated as splattered all over the shop, they are upset.
So it’s important that pacemakers are taken out before they go to the fires. The cremation papers specifically ask if there is a pacemaker (and, if so, has it been removed) but it is usually down to us to do the actual business of making the incision and winkling the thing out. In the case of Mrs Dellaway Maddie had forgotten to do this, and so she had gone