I was sitting with the head mortician having
a cup of coffee when one of the staff informed us that, “A new one has come in.” I’d already been doing the job for a few
weeks, but wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see. It turned out that this “new one” had
died in a logging accident. I was pretty sure it wasn’t the chainsaw
that had done the damage, but the fact he had been squashed under a tree. The mortician and I just looked at the body
for a while, a sight that hardly looked human anymore. The man’s head had pretty much burst, but
what was really shocking was that the skin on his face was still kind of in one piece,
but not really connected to anything. How could we possibly fix this guy? You’re probably wondering how anyone lands
a job like that…well, I guess you’re more concerned with the issue of why anyone would
want to do this as a job. The answer is pretty simple, and that’s
just the fact that someone has to do it and they have to do it well. Sure, I’ve been queasy in the past when
looking at bodies…I’ve felt sad when what I saw before me were children’s bodies,
but in the end we have a job to do and we are an indispensable service to the people
of the USA. I got the job after I saw an opening for a
mortician’s assistant while I was studying anatomy, and that’s how I ended up trying
to put back together a man that had been almost obliterated by a very heavy tree. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, or should
I say the gorier aspects of the job, I’d like to get a few things straight first. Don’t worry, I’ll get around to the most
harrowing things I’ve seen, but you guys need to know the finer details first. Ok, so you, me, your parents, the president,
the newborn next door, and every other living person on the planet will eventually die...
check out, kick the bucket, give up the ghost. Sorry to tell you that, but it’s a fact. As one of my favorite rock bands once sang,
“Do you realize... that everyone... you know... someday... will die.” Let’s see who gets that reference in the
comments section. It’s very likely that when you expire an
autopsy won’t be performed on you by a pathologist. Not many people will have a pathologist open
them up and a medical examiner later state the likely cause of death. This happens to very few people and it’s
usually because the cause of death is unknown or something looks suspicious. Here’s an example:
I know a case of an investigative journalist who apparently drowned in a swimming pool
while investigating corruption in a very corrupt country. His death was quickly ruled accidental drowning,
but when his parents demanded an autopsy it turned out that part of the guy’s tongue
was missing and he had a severe subdural hematoma (That’s torn blood vessels on the surface
of the brain). He’d actually been beaten to death, then
thrown in a pool. As I said, this was in a very corrupt country
where the cops are often seen as mafia. Before I get to my mortician stories and how
we put bodies back together to make them presentable for family and friends of the deceased, let
me quickly tell you what happens during an autopsy. I’ll try and keep this short. Let’s imagine you’ve died and your death
seems suspicious. Maybe one minute you were fine and healthy
just watching an episode of the Infographics Show, and the next minute you were found dead
in your bed. You had no serious medical conditions and
there were no obvious signs as to why you had died. Ok, so your body is then going to be taken
to an examiners room and there a pathologist and his or her assistant is going to work
on you. They are going to make what’s called a “Y-Incision”
That’s a Y shape starting from your shoulders that meets at the chest and goes down to pubic
area. You’ve likely seen the next part in a horror
movie, and this entails cracking the ribs, and for want of a better expression, opening
you up. Now your organs are exposed. The next step is to make a series of cuts
to sever certain parts of you that are all connected under the hood. That means disconnecting organs attached to
the spinal cord, and basically it’s just a lot of snipping around. Once the snipping is done the pathologist
will then remove your organs and you’ll just be a shell of your former self. That head of yours will of course still be
in tip-top condition seeing as you were found undamaged on the outside, but the pathologist
is gonna want your brain. He’s going to kind of scalp you, cutting
from one ear, across your forehead, to the other ear, and around. That cut is divided into two parts, and those
parts of the scalp will be pulled from the skull. Yep, it sounds a bit like peeling fruit…and
if you think I shouldn’t say that, let me tell you that people who’ve been doing this
a long time are pretty unaffected to what would make most ordinary folks faint or throw
up. There was a time I was one of those guys. So, that front flap goes over your face and
the back flap down towards the neck. Now it’s time to get the saw out and cut
a “cap” in the skull. Hey presto, your brain is now exposed. By the way, when that cap comes off it makes
a kind of popping sound. Let’s not forget that your brain is connected
to the spinal cord, so that connection has to be severed. Once that’s done you can take it out like
you would open a rambutan fruit What’s taken out will now be analyzed, and
that’s not something I’ll get into because it’s way too technical for today’s show…and
to be honest, I’m more of a clean up guy than a pathologist. I can tell you that the organs will be weighed,
because their weight might point to the cause of death. Your stomach contents will be examined, as
will your eye fluid, bile, urine and liver tissue, and on top of that blood tests will
be done. How did you die, you might wonder? The report said it was an overdose of information,
which is quite common in this day and age. After your organs have been analyzed and the
medical examiner has said what the cause of death is, those organs could take a number
of journeys. They might just be disposed of, or they might
be preserved or they might get put back into you. The problem now is that this mess on the table
that looks like a man who has suffered a reverse Viking Blood Eagle punishment is far from
the good-looking fella you used to be. You need to be put back together. We sometimes call this reconstituting the
body. When things are back in place your body will
be stitched up with “baseball” stitches. We call them that because they look like the
rather large stitches on a baseball. That skull cap that was taken off will be
put back on the cranium and the scalp will also be sewn back together. You’re as good as new…if not dead as a
dodo. Someone then gets on the phone and says, “Hey,
Mr. Mortician, time for you to get to work.” Like I said, not many bodies we get have come
off an autopsy table. Unfortunately, some bodies are pretty much
beyond repair. They have decomposed so badly that there’s
nothing we can do to make them presentable... that would be like trying to turn your scrambled
eggs back into the uncracked egg. In these cases we will seal the body, or body
parts, and refrigerate them. That funeral has to be quick due to the stench
of decomposition. In most cases, though, we can embalm the body,
even if it’s in a bad state. So, let’s say we get a body and that person
has been pretty beaten up after a car crash. We’ll first check the label to see who it
is, and after that, if there is any clothing on the body we are going to take that off. We’ll also cover the private parts. Now they’ll be lying down on the table with
their head elevated a little and it’s time to clean the body. Then we are going to inspect the body, such
as where all the blood has settled. This is called lividity, and if you’ve watched
enough TV crime shows, you’ll know that dead bodies will have purple parts where that
blood has settled. We’ll obviously check all vital signs, because
no one wants to bury a living person. Stranger things have happened, but not on
my watch. I can assure you that dead bodies can groan
and they can move, but that’s just because gases are in the body and muscles harden during
that period we call rigor mortis – when the body goes stiff. To release gases we can use something called
a trocar, which looks a bit like a funnel. We have a word for all this moving around
and we call it a “cadaveric spasm.” You might have heard of bodies just sitting
up, but that’s something I’ve never seen and never heard of from any other professional. Ok, so we have a body and we will massage
it to kind of relieve that stiffening of the body, the rigor mortis. We are now going to close the mouth and make
sure it stays closed, by sewing it or using wires. We will also make sure the eyes are closed,
either by using a skin-colored glue or eye caps that are skin-colored. No one wants to turn up to a casket and see
a gaping mouth, and wide-open eyes staring at them. The terms is “rest in peace”, and so the
body shouldn’t look like someone who’s just watched a video of a dark-haired Japanese
girl getting out of a well What we are going to do next is very important,
it’s our piece de resistance. We are going to find the common carotid artery
and drain the blood vessels. At the same time we’ll inject embalming
chemicals into the arteries. We use an electric pump for this, which works
kind of like the heart. The blood comes out and the fluid goes in. This process is all about preserving the body. There’s also cavity embalming, which first
involves putting one of those trocars into the chest cavity and abdomen and getting out
all the fluids and gases. After that a formaldehyde-based chemical embalming
mixture will be put in those cavities. If there are some places where the chemicals
haven’t reached we have the option of doing something called hypodermic embalming, which
is just finding the right spot to inject the chemicals. You’re probably thinking, what if the body
is torn to shreds and the face full of bullet holes. Well, in that case cauterizing chemicals will
be used to dry the wounds and bleach them. That won’t do the trick, though, and we’ll
have to sew the wounds together as best we can using a waxed suture. We might also use a skin-colored glue on the
wounds. If there are big holes we can use fillers
such as plaster of Paris and then color the filler with a kind of spray tan. If we’ve been successful you’d never know
there had been a hole. Some things we just can’t fix. Like that logger guy, we just couldn’t put
this guy back together again. He was what some of us in the profession call
a “Humpty Dumpty.” I’ve had a few of these men and women we
couldn’t put back together again, but we’ve had other cases where we spent many hours
on restoration. Some of my friends in the business of embalming
have put someone’s head back on, but that was only because it was a very clean cut,
like one from a guillotine. But if the head is gone because the accident
has basically destroyed the body, we have no chance. No one will be viewing that body. Burns can also be very problematic, a lot
harder to fix than knife wounds, gunshots wounds, or jumped off a 10th floor balcony
wounds, because we can’t give someone new skin and flesh who had suffered terrible burns. If we’ve done these first parts of the job
well, our next task is to use cosmetics to give the deceased a healthy look. We use creams and lotions and makeup for that. We are like artists, and if I must say so
myself, I’ve made people look so fine if I had posted their new face on Tinder they’d
have been swiped right on all day long. We even comb their hair and sometimes add
a bit of gel or cream, and then like amateur stylists we get to work. Dead bodies aren’t always the sweetest smelling
things in the world, so we use powders to make them more pleasing to the olfactory sense. As for clothing, that’s up to the family. Most folks go for smart business attire, but
others go for certain fashions along with some bling. Obviously if I feel like a certain body part
needs to be covered I’ll say so, because as I said, we can’t always work our magic
when the body has taken too much of a beating. If you were to ask me what was my worst day
on the job, I would not tell you it was the sight of a destroyed body, but when the person
on the table in front of me had been a high school buddy of mine. Even so, I did my best to put him back together
again. I attended the funeral as both a friend and
the man that had got him ready for his funeral. His parents came up to me and acknowledged
that it must have been very hard for me to work on their son, but they also said I’d
done a wonderful job and thanked me profusely. That still brings a tear to my eye and it’s
why I remain a person whose days are spent around dead people. I’m no longer an assistant... I’m the man himself, the main mortician
in the funeral house. The video we are going to recommend now is
an oldie but a goodie, because we all want to know the answer to, “What Happens When
You Die?”. Or perhaps you’d enjoy this other video
instead?
