Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [8]
In the event, though, what happened I would never have believed, and you had to be there to see it. Graham and Dr Burberry chatted like old friends, which I suppose they probably were, as they had worked together for a long time. They spoke about cricket, television, the weather and what they had planned for the evening. In the background, Dr Burberry insisted that we have Radio 2 on as loud as possible. As he examined Mr Evans’ organs, he placed them in a plastic tray and Graham weighed them individually, making a record of each weight. While they were doing this, they talked so normally it was obvious that they were immune to what they were doing. I stood in the background, watching in awe. It all felt comfortable and my thoughts of being out of place were starting to fade.
Dr Burberry had finished his examination within thirty minutes and then left the post-mortem room. Graham returned all the organs to Mr Evans’ body and finished stitching him up. I was asked to wash down the work bench that Dr Burberry had been using and disinfect it, which I did with pleasure. I actually felt useful at last.
FOUR
One of the things I had to learn about quickly was the Coroner’s system. The Coroner is effectively a judge – usually a lawyer, although there are some medically qualified Coroners – who has legal jurisdiction over a corpse if no natural cause of death can be given by a suitably qualified doctor. If the medical cause of death is unknown or if there is reason to believe that it may be due to unnatural causes, then the case has to be reported to the Coroner. He then has absolute control over that body – no one, not even the next of kin, can stop him asking a pathologist to do a postmortem and that way find out the reason for the death.
So much to take in. Clive told me that most of our work was for the Coroner because, following the scandals at Bristol and Alder Hey, very few hospital (for educational or research purposes) post-mortems – which require the consent of the next of kin because the cause of death is already known – were being done. This was because families, given the choice, very rarely want their loved ones literally internally examined.
Whether a cause of death is unnatural is not always as clear-cut as you may think, either. Obviously, cases of suicide, violence by a third party (which would require a forensic autopsy by the Home Office Pathologist and not just a Coroner’s autopsy) or accident are unnatural, but so is industrial disease, and so is neglect, whether self-neglect or neglect by someone else.
This leads me on to Amber Court . . .
I had been in my new job less than a week when I met my first body from Amber Court which had come to us for post-mortem. Amber Court is a large residential home on the other side of Gloucestershire; it has a reputation for being low cost and, in residential care as in most things in life, you get what you pay for. It houses a large number of frail and elderly people, and is staffed by the least talented members of society. As long as they can walk and breathe, the owners of Amber Court are happy to employ them; they are paid to do a very bad job and, in return, those in their care are treated with no respect and little, if any, kindness. I imagine a little fat greedy man, sitting in a back office tucked away somewhere, rubbing his hands together at all the money he is making by providing so-called care.
As this is common knowledge throughout Gloucestershire, almost every death they have in Amber Court gets reported to the Coroner. It is his statutory duty to rule out neglect in cases of unexpected death, and that, inevitably, means that most deaths at Amber Court end up having a post-mortem.
Clive did a quick evisceration of an elderly, frail, almost gossamer-thin