A wake of vultures

[BlueWolf]

Good read, easy to understand. Interested in more...

Thanks!

[tortminder]

Next chapter just about finished. I will probably post it next Wednesday or so. Happy New Year to all the short bus riders and window lickers!

[olfart]

Long ago... in a galaxy far, far away... Realized that if I didn't stop thinking I was John Wayne I would most likely end up seriously dead. Became a P.I. and investigative paralegal after that and did some private security/bodyguard stuff.

That comment reminds me of a Texas DPS sergeant who was notorious for his use (or misuse) of the English language. He was talking with a couple of other troopers and me about a crash they had worked recently. He commented, "That poor man is paralyzed from the waist down. He'll be a paralegal for the rest of his life." At that, the three of us cracked up, and he asked, "What did I say? What did I say?"

Another of his famous comments involved the abortion issue. "At what point does a feces become a person?" My reply to that was, "When he retires from the Highway Patrol." One of his troopers kept a notebook that he used for recording the off-the-wall comments. He probably has enough for a good book.

[tortminder]

That comment reminds me of a Texas DPS sergeant who was notorious for his use (or misuse) of the English language. He was talking with a couple of other troopers and me about a crash they had worked recently. He commented, "That poor man is paralyzed from the waist down. He'll be a paralegal for the rest of his life." At that, the three of us cracked up, and he asked, "What did I say? What did I say?"

Another of his famous comments involved the abortion issue. "At what point does a feces become a person?" My reply to that was, "When he retires from the Highway Patrol." One of his troopers kept a notebook that he used for recording the off-the-wall comments. He probably has enough for a good book.

I would love to have a copy of that notebook to use as dialogue!

[tortminder]

Chapter 3 - A WAKE OF VULTURES

New year... continuation of story:

(Continued from Chapter 2)
"Hey lieutenant, I got a real stinker for you at 8117 Bronx. The deceased looks like he's been worked over by a platoon of Mixed Martial Arts fighters. Tom Skrzyniarz caught the original call and he's busy taping off the scene. You're gonna need to call in the NORTAF crew, an Assistant States Attorney for a search warrant and somebody from the Medical Examiner's office."

"Andy, is there anything out of the ordinary, aside from a dead guy that's been beaten to a pulp, that I should know about?'

"Well, lieutenant, that type of judgement is over my pay grade. As many years as I've been on the force I can honestly say that the only time I've seen a body this mangled was some idiot that walked in front of a locomotive. All of you are gonna have to work in full hazmat suits, hoods, booties, double gloves, the whole nine yards."

"O.K. Andy, I'll roust Paul Berg and have Boerema from the States Attorney round up a judge to sign a search warrant. I probably have to call Hensen from the Medical Examiner's office to meet us there with his crew. What is the neighborhood like? I seem to remember that most of the houses in that block have been demolished."

"That's right Lieutenant, the house would have been third from the corner, but everything on the block has been leveled except for the murder scene. And, across the alley is that derelict municipal parking lot, but it's pretty overgrown with weeds."

"Tell you what Andy, from the sound of it, I'm gonna want the location around the house roped off as a primary scene and then an outer perimeter along the parkway in front and maybe half way through the parking lot in back as the secondary buffer zone to keep the brass, the press and the gawkers out.

I'll have dispatch roll another unit to your location to help with securing the area and my crew should be there in 30 minutes or so."

Litkowiak broke the connection and sergeant Novak headed back toward the yard looking for officer Skrzyniarz to fill him in on the plan.



CHAPTER 3 - A WRIGGLE OF WORMS

It takes five hours to disassemble a body. Because of the circumstances surrounding this death this one will take longer.

“John Doe: 67 inches,” is scrawled on the autopsy-room whiteboard. The dead man laid out on a metal table... head propped up on a plastic block... body naked, marked only by a neon-yellow Medical Examiner’s bracelet and a paper toe tag. The flesh, gray and exposed, stretched taut over bone. Except where putrefaction caused it to rupture. The feet are swollen, blackening; all the intact muscles tensed, the face thrown back. It’s a pudgy, round face, with few wrinkles for a middle-aged man. The chin dotted with stubble.

Present in the room are Detective Paul Berg. Hoping that the examination will yield clues to identity. Not only of the victim, but also the motive and identity of the murderer. Also present...Deputy Medical Examiner George Hensen, Medical Examiner Ponni Arunkumar MD and two intern assistants.

Everyone in the room must wear disposable garments that cover the body head to toe. The costume is a blue, ankle-length, long-sleeved surgical gown... a plastic apron... a tie-on surgical cap... a clear plastic wrap-around face protector with a foam-cushion head strap that’s actually called a “splash shield”... shoe covers, sleeve covers the length of old-Hollywood evening gloves, and latex gloves. They most resemble a macabre supermarket butcher team.

The best way to can describe the autopsy room is like a big industrial kitchen. The room is stark and spacious. Modular steel cabinets and a counter-top span the back wall, with a row of tools arranged on a cloth. Forceps (“to grab tissue with”).. scissors... scalpels... a plastic container full of scalpel blades... stainless-steel rulers... a label-maker for specimens and bright-red colander for washing organs completes the kit . Heftier tools for removing organs like the brain... including a thing that looks like a mallet, with a curved hook for leverage in pulling out bone. There are long, scalloped knives, identical to bread knives. A portable dishwasher sits along the opposite wall. Nothing in a morgue is sterilized to the level of surgical tools. These tools are cleaned on a less-stringent sanitary rinse cycle, like baby bottles.

“What we have here is a combination of surgery instruments and common garden tools and kitchen appliances” . From inside one of the cabinets Dr. Arunkumar pulls out a pair of green heavy-duty hedge sheers, at least two feet long. They’re used to crack open the rib cage, sometimes instead a bone saw. “We use them like chopping limbs off a tree,” she tells Berg.

All autopsies begin the same way. The autopsist makes three large, deep cuts into the body, forming the “Y incision.” The first two cuts start at the top of each shoulder, and extend down diagonally toward the sternum.

Then, a third cut, made where the first two intersect, a straight incision down the chest. The cuts don't bleed much after death. With the heart no longer pumping, only the pull of gravity creates blood pressure. Once cut, the chest is opened with shears to remove the organs. Arunkumar bought her shears at Lowe’s.

After those initial steps, the procedure can be modified for each case—to focus on “the money organs” in pathology, as Arunkumar jokingly calls them.

That initial opening of the body is the hardest for non-pathologists to take. Arunkumar thinks that it strikes many as profane—the way the body is manhandled onto the table, then violently pried open... bones cracking. But it’s a matter of practicality. A dead body is heavy, stiff, resistant. Force is the only way to get inside. The word autopsy means to “self-see”—from the Greek autos, self, and optos, sight.

The dead man’s chest is wide open, and the techs have carved out all the major organs, save for the brain. The organs removed en bloc, meaning they eviscerated them in “blocks”. The organs that have related functions kept together.

On a separate table, all the biological systems that middle-schoolers learn about are grouped on a single cutting board. Thoracic organs (heart and lungs) in one block, and abdominal organs (stomach, liver, gallbladder, intestines, kidneys) in a mostly-connected second block. They like learning the en bloc method, one of the interns explains, because it preserves organs’ anatomical relationships. The blocks make it easy to examine the way they interacted before death.

The organs, in a shiny, bloody pile on the plastic slab of cutting board, with slushy whorls of jaundice-yellow lung crowning the whole thing. The liver—the largest organ in the body, after the skin—is sticking up, firm in the middle of the dripping blocks. I say to Hensen that the kidneys are the same color as beets. The blood, draining away from the organ heap onto the table and into the sink below, looks like pomegranate juice.

At one point, Arunkumar draws my attention over to a “very important piece of technology.” She gestures at a computer where the pathologists enter their notes. “It has speakers so we can listen to music.” Though her residents like classic rock, Arunkumar prefers video-game soundtracks. One of her favorites is the score from Guild Wars 2, a dragon-slaying game; the score is epic and symphonic, brass blaring over cellos.

Today, a Bach concerto is playing.

For the first 15 minutes, the man’s face is uncovered. It’s the first thing Berg notices when he walks in. After that, he can’t help but to keep glancing over at it from where he stands observing Henson at the organ-block table. The eyes are still open, looking up, fixed on the ceiling. They look fearful, like they see an apparition that no one else can.

How they will talk about the body. Will they say it or he—

“Can you cover his face?” Arunkumar asks the interns—and they do, gently draping a white towel.

Like autopsy, the word pathology is from ancient Greek. Pathos—also the root word of empathy—is translated as both “suffering” and “experience.” Friedrich Nietzsche thought of pathos as “that which happens.”

Pathology is the specialty that studies the cause and effects of diseases.

Pathologists are most often found examining samples in a lab. They examine biopsies, tissue samples, wounds. If you’ve given blood or a urine samples, a pathologist was the one on the other end...analyzing it and handing back your results.

If Arunkumar and her students are any sign, pathologists love talking up their field. Most of them, it seems, have a chip on their shoulder about their specialty. They think they’re the most maligned people in medicine. They tell Berg:

“It’s one of the least popular fields.”

“We’re like the cockroaches.”

“It’s the part of medicine that people forget.”

“We’re the most misunderstood, even by doctors.”

In the room, they’re examining the organs from inside the abdominal cavity. Arunkumar shows Berg which type of scissor is best for cutting hollow viscera. A hollow viscus is any organ that isn’t solid: The liver doesn’t count, for example, but the intestines do. “Think of it like manicotti for the body,” advises one post in an online forum for medical students. “It can be stuffed with things.”

Berg: “He’s got a lot of, like something goin’ on here.”

Arunkumar: “A lot of like something goin’ on, huh?”

Every organ weighed as it’s examined... plopped onto a hanging scale like the ones for produce at grocery stores. Arunkumar and the students call out their weight estimates each time. The doctor has a reputation for guessing right by eyeballing.

Midway through the autopsy, two interns prepare to remove the brain... turning on an electric saw to make incisions into the scalp. Immediately, the saw blade falls to the tiled floor with a crash—it’s not fastened on tight enough. Arunkumar says this happens sometimes.?

One of the interns re-fastens it and begins to cut into the head.

Hensen talks over the loud whirring across the room, his voice muffled by the splash shield. He shows Berg the bowel, which he winds into a roll with two wooden sticks, like pigs in a blanket.

At the same time, Arunkumar and the interns go into a side room to take photos of abnormal tissue they’ve carved out.

Hours pass like this, the four of them pacing around each other taking samples... making cuts, asking questions, typing and jotting notes. The body, though it’s the object of investigation, becomes almost superfluous. It is literally dead weight in the room. After a while, it’s easy to become absorbed in the details of the work, to forget the larger context of where we are or what we’re doing. To forget death is a presence at all.

The organs examined one by one, Berg finds himself inching closer to the table, wanting to touch one. He gets so close that blood splashes onto his apron. Without thinking, he pulls his spiral notebook to his chest, transferring a splotch of blood onto it. “Blood on the notes?” Arunkumar asks. Without missing a beat, she douses the lined page with hydrogen peroxide and the blood disappears, leaving the ink intact.

“Not fainting?” Henson asks Berg, now that he’s been christened with bodily fluid. Arunkumar has warned him it’s not uncommon to faint during your first autopsy.

To Berg’s surprise, he doesn’t faint. Instead, he tells Henson “I can’t believe how big the liver is.”

“Do you want to touch it?” Henson asks. Berg pokes at it with his gloved hand. It feels like hardened foie gras. He starts to understand what the pathologists have been talking about. There is some less-than-subtle relationship between cooking and autopsies. The blood draining into the sink below is passing through a bright-orange colander that Henson bought at TJ Maxx. One of the interns ladles fluid out of the body’s open chest cavity into a plastic container. The ladle looks like the gravy ladle in Berg’s kitchen.

Arunkumar says, “There’s a lot of similarity between this and cooking and kitchens and...”

“And Thanksgiving,” Berg says.

“... and Thanksgiving,” Arunkumar repeats.

After five hours, Berg’s happy when it’s finally time to dissect the heart. They’ve been standing the whole time, and he’s tired, hungry, and cold in the 65-degree morgue.

The pathologists bored and restless... joking around, talking about the case less and less. Arunkumar is explaining how to open up the aorta.

Hensen makes precise centimeter-long cuts near the middle of the heart, running parallel to the groove between the atria and the ventricles.

Glancing at it, Arunkumar says, “Well, it’s what you’d tell a med student about what goes wrong with the heart.” Signs point to stress related coronary myocardial infarction.

Arunkumar asks Henson and the interns if they can handle sewing up the body. They place the organs back inside, then put the body back into refrigeration until the funeral home comes for it. The only things Cook County keeps are the slides and jars of samples.

The end of the autopsy is the most difficult part for Berg.

“We pretty much return a shell to the family,” Hensen says. “We return the leftover pieces, cut-up pieces, in a big plastic bag. We put it—very messy—into the body and then we sew everything back up. But then nothing is perfect, because we don’t put the bones back together, so we sew the skin over it. So the person’s chest comes out a little bit, so it doesn’t look natural.”

They do a nice job with the head, Henson says, careful to replace the brain and to not damage the face. And the funeral home is very adept at making everything look presentable. But that image of the hollowness stays with Berg.

The pathologists want to know how my first autopsy went. I say I’m surprised how banal it all was. How after only a few hours in the room, I was thinking about my feet hurting rather than the corpse five feet from me.

Henson suggests that I get a cup of coffee from the commissary while he Dr. Arunkumar transcribe their notes into a report that will make some sense.

more in a week or so

---tort--

[olfart]

Interesting, but the multitude of question marks has me befuddled. Are these notes to yourself to check those sentences for accuracy, position, etc.?

[tortminder]

Interesting, but the multitude of question marks has me befuddled. Are these notes to yourself to check those sentences for accuracy, position, etc.?

Apparently there is a glitch somewhere in the formatting since I cut the manuscript and pasted into notepad before posting here. The question marks seemed to appear like little gremlins. I have manually removed them from the post. Thanks for the feedback.

---tort--

[roach2654]

Keep it coming Tort! Good to see you on here!

[Boston_Joe]

Waiting impatiently for the next installment.

[Jstwaiting]

Waiting ...Waiting ...Waiting ...Waiting ...

[tortminder]

Waiting ...Waiting ...Waiting ...Waiting ...

Don't shoot the piano player, he's playing as fast as he can.
The author, on the other hand is still working on the next chapter. You guys are getting it in 3rd draft form... pretty much hot off the computer, as it were.

[Boston_Joe]

Not good enough. We demand to see the words as they hit your screen.

Kidding. Sorta.

[tortminder]

Not good enough. We demand to see the words as they hit your screen.

Kidding. Sorta.

To quote Monty Python; "I fart in your general direction!"
(Them ghost peppers are killer.)

[tortminder]

A WAKE OF VULTURES-CHAPTER 3 A wriggle of worms

WARNING- Graphic. Not for the faint of heart, (or stomach)
CHAPTER 3 - A WRIGGLE OF WORMS

It takes about five hours to disassemble a body. Because of the circumstances surrounding this death this one will take longer.

The dead man—“John Doe: 67 inches,” as scrawled on the autopsy-room whiteboard—is laid out on a metal table, head propped up on a plastic block. The body is naked, marked only by a neon-yellow Medical Examiner’s bracelet and a paper toe tag. The flesh—now gray and exposed—is stretched tautly over bone except where putrefaction has caused it to rupture. The feet are swollen, blackening; all the intact muscles are tensed, the face thrown back. It’s a pudgy, round face, with few wrinkles for a middle-aged man. The chin is dotted with stubble.

Present in the room are Detective Paul Berg. He is hoping that the examination will yield some clues as to identity not only of the victim, but also the motive and identity of the murderer. Also present are Deputy Medical Examiner George Hensen, Medical Examiner Ponni Arunkumar MD and two intern assistants.

Everyone in the room is required to wear disposable garments that cover the body head to toe. They put on a blue, ankle-length, long-sleeved surgical gown, a plastic apron, a tie-on surgical cap, a clear plastic wrap-around face protector with a foam-cushion head strap that’s actually called a “splash shield,” shoe covers, sleeve covers the length of old-Hollywood evening gloves, and latex gloves. They most resemble a macabre supermarket butcher team.

The best way to can describe the autopsy room is like a big industrial kitchen. The room is stark and surprisingly spacious. Modular steel cabinets and a counter-top span the back wall, where a row of tools is laid out on a cloth. A couple of forceps (“to grab tissue with”), scissors, scalpels, a plastic container full of scalpel blades, stainless-steel rulers, a label-maker for specimens, a bright-red colander for washing organs. There are heftier tools for removing organs like the brain, including a thing that looks like a mallet, with a curved hook for leverage in pulling out bone. There are long, scalloped knives, identical to bread knives. A portable dishwasher sits along the opposite wall. Because of the condition of its patients, nothing in a morgue needs to be sterilized to the level of surgical tools, so these tools are cleaned on a less-stringent sanitary rinse cycle, like baby bottles.

“What we have is a combination of surgery implements and common garden tools and kitchen appliances,” Arunkumar says. From inside one of the cabinets she pulls out a pair of green heavy-duty hedge sheers, at least two feet long. They’re used to crack open the rib cage, sometimes in lieu of a bone saw. “We use them like chopping limbs off a tree,” she tells Berg.

All autopsies begin the same way: The autopsist makes three large, deep cuts into the body, forming the “Y incision.” The first two cuts start at the top of each shoulder, extending down diagonally toward the sternum.



Then, a third cut is made where the first two intersect, a straight incision down the chest. The cuts barely bleed; after death, with the heart no longer pumping, only the pull of gravity creates blood pressure. Once cut, the chest is opened up with shears to remove the organs. Arunkumar bought her shears at Lowe’s.

After those initial steps, the procedure can be modified for each case—to focus on “the money organs” in pathology, as Arunkumar jokingly calls them. But that initial opening of the body is the hardest for non-pathologists to take. Arunkumar thinks that it strikes many as profane—the way the body is manhandled onto the table, then violently pried open, bones cracking. But it’s a matter of practicality. A dead body is heavy, stiff, resistant. Force is the only way to get inside. The word autopsy literally means to “self-see”—from the Greek autos, self, and optos, sight.

The dead man’s chest has been cut wide open, and the techs have carved out all the major organs, save for the brain. They’ve been removed en bloc, meaning they were eviscerated in “blocks,” keeping the organs that have related functions together. On a separate table, all the biological systems that middle-schoolers learn about are grouped together on a single cutting board: thoracic organs (heart and lungs) in one block, and abdominal organs (stomach, liver, gallbladder, intestines, kidneys) in a mostly-connected second block. They like learning the en bloc method, one of the interns explains, because it preserves organs’ anatomical relationships. The blocks make it easy to examine the way they interacted before death.

The organs are in a shiny, bloody pile on the plastic slab of cutting board, slushy whorls of jaundice-yellow lung crowning the whole thing. The liver—the largest organ in the body, after the skin—is sticking up, firm in the middle of the dripping blocks. I say to Hensen that the kidneys are the same color as beets. The blood, which is draining away from the organ heap onto the table and into the sink below, looks like pomegranate juice.

At one point, Arunkumar draws my attention over to a “very important piece of technology.” She gestures at a computer where the pathologists enter their notes. “It has speakers so we can listen to music.” Though her residents like classic rock, Arunkumar prefers video-game soundtracks. One of her favorites is the score from Guild Wars 2, a dragon-slaying game; the score is epic and symphonic, brass blaring over cellos.

Today, a Bach concerto is playing.

For the first 15 minutes, the man’s face is uncovered. It’s the first thing I notice when I walk in. After that, I can’t help but to keep glancing over at it from where I stand observing Henson at the organ-block table. The eyes are still open, looking up, fixed on the ceiling. They look fearful, like they see an apparition that no one else can.

I wonder how they will talk about the body. I wonder if they’ll say it or he—

“Can you cover his face?” Arunkumar asks the interns—and they do, gently draping a white towel.



Like autopsy, the word pathology is from ancient Greek. Pathos—also the root word of empathy—can be translated as both “suffering” and “experience.” Friedrich Nietzsche thought of pathos simply as “that which happens.”

In medicine, pathology is the specialty that studies the cause and effects of diseases. Pathologists are most often found examining samples in a lab—biopsies, tissue samples, wounds. If you’ve ever given blood or a urine sample, a pathologist was likely the one on the other end, analyzing it and handing back your results. They also spend a lot of time advising clinicians about the condition of patients, helping them determine possible care and treatment. William Osler, an early 20th-century Canadian physician sometimes referred to as the “father of modern medicine,” called pathologists “the doctor’s doctors.” It’s a maxim that today’s pathologists still identify with.

Within the medical field, though, pathologists are often stereotyped as cold and detached, even creepy: They’re the doctors who don’t like patients; the ones who would rather hang out in basement labs all day.

If Arunkumar and her students are any indication, pathologists love talking up their field. Most of them, it seems, have a chip on their shoulder about their specialty. They think they’re the most maligned people in medicine. They tell Berg:

“It’s one of the least popular fields.”

“We’re like the cockroaches.”

“It’s the part of medicine that people forget.”

“We’re probably the most misunderstood, even by doctors.”

During the autopsy lull, Arunkumar emails Berg a 1994 article from The New Physician, a journal for medical students, titled “Pathology: Myths and Truths.” “Pathology is not simply one of the courses standing between medical students and ‘real’ medicine,” it reads. “Within our specialty, the principles of the basic sciences are artfully applied to very real, often complex, patient problems. Pathologists are not ‘locked up’ in the lab. They are constantly communicating with each other, healthcare workers, patients, laboratory personnel, and individuals in the community as they work to solve diagnostic problems.”



In the room, they’re examining the organs from inside the abdominal cavity. Arunkumar shows Berg which type of scissor is best for cutting hollow viscera. A hollow viscus is any organ that isn’t solid: The liver doesn’t count, for example, but the intestines do. “Think of it like manicotti for the body,” advises one post in an online forum for medical students. “It can be stuffed with things.”

Berg: “He’s got a lot of, like… something goin’ on here.”

Arunkumar: “A lot of like something goin’ on, huh?”



Every organ is weighed as it’s examined, plopped onto a hanging scale just like the ones for produce at grocery stores, and Arunkumar and the students call out their weight estimates each time. Arunkumar has a reputation for guessing right just by eyeballing.

Midway through the autopsy, two interns prepare to remove the brain, turning on an electric saw to make incisions into the scalp. Immediately, the saw blade falls to the tiled floor with a crash—it’s not fastened on tight enough. Arunkumar says this happens sometimes. One of the interns re-fastens it and begins to cut into the head, Hensen talking over the loud whirring across the room, his voice slightly muffled by the splash shield covering his face. He shows Berg the bowel, which he winds into a roll with two wooden sticks, like pigs in a blanket. At the same time, Arunkumar and the interns go into a side room to take photos of abnormal tissue they’ve carved out that might be significant for the case file.

Hours pass like this, the four of them pacing around each other taking samples, making cuts, asking questions, typing and jotting notes. The body, though it’s the object of investigation, becomes almost superfluous, literally dead weight in the room. After a while, it’s easy to become absorbed in the details of the work, to forget the larger context of where we are or what we’re doing. To forget death is a presence at all.

As more time passes, the organs gingerly examined one by one, Berg finds himself inching closer to the table, wanting to touch one. He gets so close that blood splashes onto his apron. Without thinking, he pulls his spiral notebook to his chest, transferring a splotch of blood onto it. “Blood on the notes?” Arunkumar asks. Without missing a beat, she douses the lined page with hydrogen peroxide and the blood disappears, leaving the ink intact.

“Not fainting?” Henson asks Berg, now that he’s been christened with bodily fluid. Arunkumar has warned him it’s not uncommon to faint during your first autopsy.

To Berg’s surprise, he doesn’t faint. Instead, he tells Mosch “I can’t believe how big the liver is.”

“Do you want to touch it?” Henson asks. Berg pokes at it with his gloved hand. It feels like hardened foie gras. He sees what the pathologists have been talking about: Maybe there is some less-than-subtle relationship between cooking and autopsies. All the blood draining into the sink below is passing through a bright-orange colander that Henson bought at TJ Maxx. One of the interns ladles fluid out of the body’s open chest cavity into a plastic container. The ladle looks just like the gravy ladle in Berg’s kitchen.

Arunkumar says, “There’s a lot of similarity between this and cooking and kitchens and…”

“And Thanksgiving,” Berg says.

“… and Thanksgiving,” Arunkumar repeats.



After five hours, Berg’s happy when it’s finally time to dissect the heart. They’ve been standing the whole time, and he’s tired, hungry, and cold in the 65-degree morgue.

The pathologists are bored and restless, too. They’re joking around, talking about the case less and less. Arunkumar is explaining how to open up the aorta.

Hensen makes precise centimeter-long cuts near the middle of the heart, running parallel to the groove between the atria and the ventricles, the top and bottom halves of the heart. Glancing at it, Arunkumar says, “Well, it’s basically everything you’d tell a med student about what goes wrong with the heart.” Signs point to stress related coronary myocardial infarction.

Arunkumar asks Henson and the interns if they can handle sewing up the body. They will place the organs back inside, then put the body back into refrigeration until the funeral home comes for it. The only things Cook County keeps are the slides and jars of samples.

The end of the autopsy is the most difficult part for Henson.

“We pretty much return a shell to the family,” he says. “We return the leftover pieces, cut-up pieces, in a big plastic bag. We put it—very messy—into the body and then we sew everything back up. But then nothing is perfect, because we don’t put the bones back together, so we just sew the skin over it. So the person’s chest just comes out a little bit, so it doesn’t look natural.”

They do a nice job with the head, Henson says, careful to replace the brain and to not damage the face. And the funeral home is very adept at making everything look presentable. But that image of the hollowness stays with him.

The pathologists want to know how my first autopsy went. I say I’m surprised how banal it all was—how after only a few hours in the room, I was thinking about my feet hurting rather than the corpse five feet from me.

Henson suggests that I get a cup of coffee from the commissary while he Dr. Arunkumar transcribe their notes into a report that will make some sense.

(To be continued)
---tort--

[W.Lynn]

Did you mean to post the autopsy again?