Starting out

So not everybody at the Coroner's Office works directly with dead people. There are administrative people around to answer phones and stock shelves and fill out paperwork and file things and fix things and basically keep everything moving along. The thing that surprises me about them (but probably shouldn't) is how squeamish they tend to be about the dead. I used to think that, working in a place like that, you'd expect everybody to be fairly comfortable with the idea that a lot of the people in the general vicinity are dead but it really doesn't work that way. And I mean really. I'm not talking blood-on-your-shoes squeamish, I'm talking people whose eyes go all wide if you're wearing squeaky-clean, pressed greens on your (brief) way to your office squeamish.

(I remember there was this secretary at my residency who used to make us hang our white coats on a hook outside her office or she wouldn't let us walk in. If you asked her why, she'd say something about how you might have just walked out of an autopsy or something. Never mind that we don't wear our coats during autopsies. Never mind that we're covered head to toe with all sorts of gear when we're actually doing a case. Never mind that we only spent six months out of a five year residency doing autopsies at all. Never mind all that: all throughout that whole five year residency you had to hang up your coat outside her door because she thought your coat might have maybe seen a dead person. That's what I'm talking about.)

At our office, and I get the feeling that this is not uncommon, there are a lot of safeguards in place to make sure that you don't accidentally walk down the wrong hallway and end up face to face with a dead person. Dead people are only allowed in one of the two buildings. (No dead people are allowed in the administrative building at all.) Dead people are only allowed on one floor of the other building and you need a special key to get on that floor (even when you're using the elevator.) When you get off the elevator (or step out of the stairwell) you are not going to be immediately covered in a pile of rotting dead people. Honest. While the hallway, truth be told, smells like a trash truck, the first dead people you will encounter are lying on gurneys behind closed doors to your right and left. And they're not hiding behind the door to jump out and yell "boo" or touch you or whatever. Honestly, I don't know what people are thinking.

All I'm saying is, if you decide to be a forensic pathologist, try to remember that while you are getting used to being around dead people, the people around might not be. They might be a little freaked out about it. They might even, in that weird backward way that psychology works sometimes, be even more freaked out about dead people than your average, non-Coroner's-Office-Working person might be. All I'm saying is just remember to change out of your scrubs before you go barging into the lunchroom.