Love and the cutting room floor

I love them with diagrams. The more diagrams the better. A diagram for postmortem changes, another for medical interventions. One for the tattoos, scars, and other identifying marks. One for each gunshot wound. A summary diagram for all the gunshot wounds put together.

I love them with my ruler. I measure everything about the wound that I can think of-- everything that looks like a thing that can be measured. I measure the distance from an extra landmark when there's one around (the nipple, the umbilicus...) and from the table surface so that I have three dimensions. I measure the defect in four quadrants, I orient it to the hands of a clock.

I love them with my knife. Anyone can make a single cut through the liver and throw it in the stock jar-- I slice it thin, one smooth motion per cut (which takes practice) and slide the flat of the blade over the surface to wipe the blood away each time (it's a habit by now to be honest) and peer at it looking for some tiny difference in anatomy. (I caught a liver hemangioma yesterday!) That sort of stuff will never end up in court and it isn't the cause of death but it only takes another minute or so and it looks so nice in the report-- I looked, I really looked. His life mattered, his death matters, he means something. He may be a really rough guy but he's somebody's baby and his mother may well read this someday and while I don't know if she'll see it for what it is I'm leaving her a little note in the chart in a way that says that her baby was important and deserving of the best care I could give.

A couple of weeks ago, I did an overdose where the family was worried about a heart murmur he had as a kid. There's a really common little extra sound that kids make that's technically a "murmur" but isn't dangerous at all and that's what he must have had because his heart valves were perfect and there's this little place in the protocol where you say that but I added another couple of sentances about all the things that can go wrong with valves that he specifically did not have. I did that for his mom. Okay, probably she won't but maybe she would know that I wasn't just checking off boxes on a sheet of paper: I listened to her and I looked for an answer for her-- really looked-- and I found the answer. Even though we do just gobs of overdoses, even though they are so common as to be disappointing when you discover that you've been assigned yet another one, she matters, her son matters, his life matters, and I gave him the best care I could.

You can tell from my knife.