Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [74]
Actually pacemakers cause us a lot of trouble in the mortuary in other ways. In the old days, all pacemakers were just harmless little things about the size of a box of matches; they’re usually put in just under the skin in front of the left shoulder, with a lead going from there into the heart, and they’re accordingly easy to take out. All these ones do is send a regular, small electric shock to the heart to make sure it keeps beating. Nowadays, more and more of them are sophisticated and actually sense what the heart is doing; if it stops, they will deliver a large electric shock to restart it. From our point of view this presents a serious problem: in order to get the pacemaker out, we have to cut the leads to the heart, and the bloody thing interprets this as the heart stopping, so we get the shock. Some mortuary staff have been severely injured. The cardiac technicians have to come over and wave a special wand over them to switch them off, and if this is not picked up on and the leads are cut, you may need an ambulance on stand-by.
Telling which are the ordinary ones and which are the lethal ones is becoming harder and harder, so every time we take out a pacemaker, we tend to utter a silent prayer to St Dismas, the patron saint of mortuary technicians.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Christmas in the Williams household has always been a big deal. When Michael and I were children, it was a strict rule that no matter what time we woke up in the morning, be it five or eight thirty, we were not allowed downstairs until our parents woke and took the lead. Right up until our early teens, before we both discovered alcohol and Christmas Eve on the town with our friends, Michael and I would always abandon one of our bedrooms and share the same room on the night before, and wait and watch for Father Christmas. This process usually involved one of us dragging the mattress across the landing to whoever was occupying the bigger room, and it was the only night of the year we would be granted Mum’s approval for this act.
Dad would always go first down the stairs when my parents woke on Christmas morning. He would open the door to the lounge and, guaranteed every year, would turn to us both and say, ‘Sorry, kids, he’s not been,’ his face looking disappointed. And, again, up until our early teens Michael and I fell for it every time. As our faces dropped while we sat on the bottom of the stairs, Dad would open the lounge door slowly to reveal the whole room overflowing with presents. An armchair each piled high, with plenty surrounding the floor around them.
Michael and I might now be grown up, with our own homes and lives, but it’s as if it has been ingrained into us unconsciously that Christmas Day needs to be spent with each other as a family. Around about November each year, Mum asks us what we have in mind for the big day, if anything, and tells us earnestly that she doesn’t mind if we have plans to spend Christmas Day elsewhere. ‘Dad and I don’t mind at all,’ she always says. ‘We can see you before or after, it’s not a problem. We know you’re grown up now.’ I wouldn’t have things any other way, though, and even Michael will spend the day away from Sarah his girlfriend, while she is with her parents (although his mobile, guaranteed, will be going non-stop during the day, and she will always happily join us for the evening). Luke and I share our families; his being larger than mine, we are able to spend Boxing Day with them without feeling we have left anyone on their own.
When Mum had initially mentioned Christmas in early November, my first thought was to wonder, Am I going to be on call? As much as I cared about the mortuary and its patients, this was the last thing I wanted. Being on call meant no participation in the champagne breakfast, staying on soft drinks in the local pub for the customary two hours it would open in the morning, one glass of wine with Christmas dinner to toast the day, and being the sober hostess for the evening while all the family and friends arrived and tucked into