Running the bowel

So there's this trend you notice cropping up everywhere where, in the interests of thoroughness, you end up having to do more and more picky little things that are very, very low-yield: filling out a little check sheet that says "yes, this guy had an appendix, yes, this guy had a spleen, yes, this guy had a gallbladder" and "yes, I checked my jar labels, and yes, the head tech checked them, too, and, yes, they look all right to both of us." And there's running the bowel.

Running the bowel means taking your scissors and sliting the bowel open from the ligament of Trietz to the rectum, making sure there's no blood or holes or Meckel's diverticulum or foreign objects or polyps or whatever in there. The thing is, you can tell if there are going to be bullet holes because your guy will have bullet holes elsewhere nearby. You can also tell if there's going to be blood because it turns the outside of the gut purply-red. Polyps, okay, that's precancerous and, in the large (but not small) intestine, you can kind of make a case for that. Ditto for foreign objects, if you have no cause of death and there's some external evidence of bowel injury with no other reasonable source.

But running the gut on every case indiscriminately is a waste of time. I know because I have to do it.

Wanna know what I've learned? Lots of people eat corn.