scene photos

a man stands at the back of the picture at the edge of a roadway or parking lot. you can see the yellow tape in the foreground, but it's a little out of focus. he's wearing a dark blue suit in a style forty years out of date. behind him is a disorderly row of bushes. he's squinting slightly; you can't tell which way he's looking.

in the second shot, the camera has moved toward the bushes. there is a pale thing stuck into them. it is the back and hips of woman, crumpled into a strange, awkward seated position, crammed against the bushes. she is nude.

on smell

so we have a cadaver-sniffing dog.

i know, i know, she's there for when thebody is buried or hidden or has been dead for a very, very long time but some days i hit the autopsy floor and i think for this you definitely don't need a dog...

a word about props...

so, on tv shows, they tend to show us dictating into a microphone that hangs from the celing. it would be nice and would save a lot of time but how are you supposed to do that in a room full of buzzsaws?

also, they tend to give us surgical trays on tv. the thing is, medical instruments are expensive and, well, that level of precision is no longer necessary if your patient is dead. so we tend to use stuff from restaurant supply companies and Home Depot...

Research

So there's this guy on the autopsy floor today talking to the chief and I walk up, thinking that this is one of the mucky-mucks wandering about on a tour of some kind and we've got some really good cases on the floor that I can spontaneously talk up.

Turns out the guy is a mystery writer and he wants to know what coroners wear.

So there's a picture of me in full regalia on a cell phone somewhere...

More about Aaron

So Aaron and I are hanging out in the office and I tell him that I'm hardly supervised anymore. I mean, there is still a senior medical examiner assigned to my case and all, but they kind of show up at the end and leave after a little prefunctory poking of the organ bucket. I'm thinking this means I'm nearly done, I've demonstrated some measure of competence, and that people feel comfortable with my assessment of the body.

So Aaron says that they tended to hang out on the autopsy floor more with the previous fellow, but, then again, she was good-looking.




(For the record, I have never wondered why Aaron does not do well with women.)

Court day today

One of the things I really like about my court days is that no one in court knows who the @#$! I am and what the @#$)(*! I'm doing there. I just show up in my little court suit, watch the DME testify, and then scoot out the door with him at the end of the whole thing. I like being the mysterious woman from nowhere. For a nerd with a microscope, that's pretty much the most I can hope for. I mean, look, I come home to an apartment full of cats and my boyfriend of a bazillion years to sit down to an evening of Trader Joe's salad and netflix-- glamour I don't have.

It reminds me of one of our professors. She was described by my stylish gay friend as a Monet (beautiful from far away but kind of strange-looking close up...) but believe me the far away manifestation was all Rita Hayworth: leggy brunette with a wide, Earthy smile that promised wild, worldly indescretion. She's moved on to other medical centers-- hobbies like hers are not conducive to successful office politics and, besides, people don't take you seriously when your nickname is "legs"-- but I used to love living vicariously through her: the time she wanted to bring one of the med students from her study group (whom she was dating) to the office Christmas party (hosted by our department chair, whom she was also dating)... the time she got caught in the frozen section room all tangled up in a (married) surgeon...

While a part of me would also like to be legendary, sitting at the edge of the gallery for no apparent reason and leaving suddenly in the middle of a murder trial is as close as I'll ever get.

This just in

Rumor has it that at the last big ACGME meeting (ACGME stands for blah blah blah Graduate Medical Education and means that they are in charge of residencies and fellowships) it was decided that, as of July, 2007, forensics fellows will no longer have to take microscopic sections on every single @#$)ing case.


To the class of 2008: you're welcome.

Old friends

So you might well wonder why on Earth I need a whole year to learn how to count bullet holes. This is a valid question. I think there are a couple answers to the question "why is a forensics fellowship a year long?"

Firstly, it's the shortest unit of time that seems to be recognized by boards. I don't think there's anything out there shorter than a year. Secondly, I think there's a lot that I'm still not going to know at the end of the year, not the least of which is how to avoid the traps that seem to loom all around me in my imagination, arranged around the general theme of "imaginary defense attorneys trying to make me look/feel stupid in public." But the thing I really feel myself learning is the feel and look of normal organs. At this point, no one has to tell me that the lungs are congested or the liver is fibrotic or the heart is pale/scarred or the brain is too soft for this postmortem interval. These organs and I are old friends by now-- familiar enough to feel too heavy in my hand or to catch my attention with a slight change in their usual shade of pink.

Coping strategies

Here are some coping strategies I've noticed around the office.

1. prayer
2. spiritual reading
3. mutual support
4. volunteer work
5. way too many office houseplants
6. loud music
7. gallows humor
8. overeating
9. non-threatening flirting
10. creepy staring
11. unfocused bitterness
12. very focused bitterness
13. despair
14. alcohol
15. hiding in the locker room
16. sudden, bizarre revelations
17. a whole lot more alcohol
18. veiled threats
19. open hostility
20. funny hats
21. camaraderie of the damned

Autopsies for beginners: watch your back!

So another thing I kept doing in the beginning is leaning back against the table. The thing is, all the protective gear I strap to myself doesn't actually cover the behind. There are two things that then begin to get on your nerves:
1) the damp feeling coming from the stripe across your backside placed there by the bloody edge of the autopsy table
2) people telling you that you've got some blood on yourself