We all die, but we never expect it to happen to us

Death usually announces itself with clarity. If you walk into a room with a dead person, you have a better than average chance of perceiving that death has entered, or rather that  life has left the body.  There are subtle clues such as the complete lack of breathing; the change in color which depending on how long its been can run from very pale to bruised to skin dripping off the flesh. Other clues may include whole body stiffness; blood and other liquids running out of any available openings (this is very common when a person dies on their side or stomach). Finally the most subtle clues of all, a totally diminished response to stimulus (such as “Hey Alice, are you feeling ok?” followed by the deceased person not moving or answering at all); and the odor of rotting flesh.

These clues allow professionals like me to quickly identify the deceased and help to avoid awkward situations such as putting a toe tag on a sleeping relative of the deceased. However not everybody has had the opportunity for higher education in the art of recognizing these clues.

We found the house downtown in the middle of the night. This was a funeral home call and there was a hospice nurse waiting for us.  Normally in a case like this we get there within an hour or two of death and the body is still warm. This time however when we entered the home the first two things we noticed were temperature and the smell.

The temperature outside was a wonderful 68 degrees F and as we stepped inside the climate felt like the inside of a six cubic yard garbage can filled with old meat and asparagus sitting in the sun,… no make that sitting on the sun.  As I filled out some paperwork I overheard the elderly husband saying that he only thought she was sick and didn’t want to disturb his sleeping wife.

Next I took a quick look at the body and noted that the level of rigor mortis, blood from her mouth and nose and odor suggested she had died two or three days earlier.  We bagged her up and  as we carried her out I could hear her husband saying “I never thought she could be dead.”

It was then I realized how lucky his wife was….. To have a spouse that would let you sleep for two or three days.

A well flung man

The call was for a traffic fatality on a twisty two-lane road to nowhere. This area is remote and I was glad to finally see it in daylight. Not like last time.  As we drove to the site we speculated on the cause and what we would find. Our best guess was a car sliding off the road into a deep little valley of which there are many in this area. What we found was straight flat road just past a sharp turn. We saw the requisite skid marks indicating a the truck drifted into the oncoming lane just putting the left hand wheels into the dirt then over correcting onto the right shoulder then spinning back across both lanes and finally rolling about 250 feet through a fence and plenty of cactus and rocks.

The truck was in really bad shape and the tow truck driver was struggling to get the wheels pointed straight so he could get it on the tow truck.  It turns out he is my neighbor and as he was busy with the wreck he didn’t see me approach. I said hi and he looked at me standing in this huge field of cactus and rocks holding a body bag and a fold out stretcher.  I could see he was struggling to figure out why his neighbor who he knows as a Realtor was suddenly standing here in the middle of no where looking for a body.

“Can you direct me to the body?” I asked. “What in the hell are you doing here?”  I explained that his was my night job. He made a face like a guy unexpectedly tasting shit on his pancakes and pointed further out in the field. “About 200 feet more”  he said.

At this point I should explain that when people are ejected from a vehicle, they rarely travel more than 50  or 100 feet.  When I finally found him on a pile of rocks and cactus I looked back to where his truck had stopped and calculated that he had flown at least 200 feet.  Now I say “flown” because the ground there was thick with rocks, cactus and thick little bushes with thorns. If he had tried to skip along the ground he would not have made it very far.  Clearly this guy had been going for some kind of record.

Looking in the cab of his truck I saw that he had buckled his seatbelt behind him to turn off the little alarm that tells you to buckle up. In spite of the great speed at which he seemed to have exited the driver’s window opening and the great distance he covered, he was mostly intact. His legs had several extra joints and his head had a good size hole in the back and his shirt was streched out on a cactus, nearly pulled off his body and pointing the way from which he had come in such a hurry.

I noticed the local sheriffs had painted a white spot on a rock near where he ended up. I don’t know what the mark was for, but the chances of anybody finding that rock again are pretty slim.

24 Tons

When I get a call for a traffic fatality the description is usually “Hwy 40, mile marker 230.5″ or something like that. Because there is no house address I can know what to expect. The other day we got one of those and we were looking for the particular mile marker on the highway. Just past an overpass we spotted the flashing lights of the Highway Patrol. The accident however was not on the highway, but inside the clover-leaf of the on-ramp. Large construction equipment was in the process of moving dirt and rocks. Two over-sized tow trucks were trying to right a water truck that was on it’s side.

It seems that the driver had backed up to the edge of a large water collection basin about 40 feet deep. He got too close to the edge and rolled. He was ejected in the process and the truck which weighed in at 24 tons came to rest on top of our unfortunate client.  When the tow truck operators finally got the truck  back on its wheels using their high-tech wireless remote controls we found the victim resembled a large insect that had been stepped on by a much larger boot. He was still recognizable as a human, only much flatter than your standard human. His head was also flat with one eye staring straight up into the air like the eye of a flounder looking up from the seafood cooler case at the grocery store.  His arms and legs ran in uncomfortable to look at angles.

The Highway Patrol officers put on gloves and jumped right in to help us (the Sheriffs who we normally see during our work rarely offer to help so bonus points to the Troopers). We picked up our pancaked friend and placed him in the body bag. As we did so I noticed that I had stepped in something sticky. I pulled my boot back and looked at the pile of brains I had just stepped in and thought some potty-mouth words. My partner Roger got down on his knees and began to grab hand fulls of brain tissue in his gloved hands and place them in another bag. I grabbed a couple fist-size pieces of skull. I looked up at the Highway Patrol officers and noticed that a couple of them had looks of horror on their faces as Roger continued to scoop up the brains with his hands. One of the officers handed Roger a broken tail light cover to use as a scooper, but he was too absorbed with the task to stop.

When Roger was finally finished with his zombie fetish, the Troopers helped us carry the body bag up the hill out of the basin to the van. It was odd to note that with all the damage to the body, the cell phone on his belt seemed intact. One of the Troopers asked about taking it, but declined to do anything. A few minutes later we were driving down the highway when the victim’s cell phone began to ring.  “I can’t come to the phone right now because I have a truck on my mind”.

When I got home my wife came outside while I was washing off my boots with the hose. She gave me a questioning look, “brains” I said. She shook her head and asked me when I was going to get another job.

Standing Room

I love new experiences. I guess that for me they make life interesting. I would even go so far as to say that a major part of the decision to take on this job is for the experiences which I get to collect.  Some jobs are boring, and some fortunately are very interesting.

We rolled up to a large ranch style house and the sheriff led us into the kitchen and stopped. He handed me the yellow card which has all the information I need to complete my paperwork.  I looked it over and then waited for the sheriff to show me to the body, he just stood there with an odd expression on his face.  I turned around slowly to see if I had missed something and notice the lady standing at the sink.  Nothing odd about that except that she seemed to have a sheet over her.

Upon closer examination I saw an elderly lady who seemed to have been standing at the sink in her robe. She folded her arms on the counter and placed her head on her arms and then proceeded to die.  Our best guess was that this happened early in the morning. She was discovered about dinner time and full rigor had set in.

I should point out that we really appreciate when people die in a location and position that makes it easy for us to collect them.  This lady was standing near the door and as she was still standing, all we had to do was set up the gurney and body bag under her and lay her back.

All too often people die in awkward places like the space between the toilet and the wall.  Then we have to pry them out and we don’t enjoy that. Also people often die in positions that make things hard for us. First if they are on their stomach or side its a problem. On their stomach, fluids tend to run out of the nose and mouth and make a mess. On their sides the arms are sticking out and when rigor sets in it makes it hard to get the body bag zipped closed.

Mobile homes are often a problem in themselves, with narrow hallways and lots of 90 degree corners to navigate. If you are thinking about dying please do us a favor and go outside in the yard first, actually the front yard near the driveway would be best, lay on your back with your arms folded across your chest and for God’s sakes close your eyes.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Bullets and Cell Phones

When on call I often listen to the police scanner just to get a heads up on what calls I might have to respond to. The other night Roger and I were unloading a body at the medical examiner’s office when I heard a call for “car into a fence”.  Roger looked at me with a look that said just what I was thinking, “that call will not result in a death, which means we can ignore it”. It turns out that the guy driving the car that ran through the fence was less than cooperative with the local P.D.

When we arrived at the scene the next morning at 4:00 am there was a generator driving huge portable lights making the field look pretty bizarre. There was police tape around a rectangle of grassy field about the size of a football field. In the middle of the police tape was a car, still idling that had run through a fence. Also there was a body on the ground.

The previous evening the gentleman who ran his car through the fence apparently jumped out of his car and shouted “shoot me” to the police officer. He then put his hand in his pocket and withdrew something dark and held it in both hands, like a gun, aimed at the police officer. The result was about six bullet holes. It is always interesting to me that bullet holes look so small like relatively minor injuries.

Its also interesting to see the lengths the paramedics go to for people who have zero chance of surviving. This guy had I.V. tubes all over the place and an airway installed. But he also had bullet holes in his chest, his side, his leg his ass and one hand. We even found the crumpled remains of a 40 caliber hollow point on the ground next to him.  On TV, bullet wounds often result in huge holes and gallons of blood, but the reality here was very small holes going in, no exit holes (except the hand) and very little blood.

Cleaning up a plane crash

My partner Roger had told me about doing plane crashes before and I always thought it would be interesting. I finally got my chance to find out. We arrived at the scene just after dark. We could see the flashing lights of the emergency response vehicles but it took a few minutes to figure out how to get out there since there was no road where the plane landed. Police tape surrounded the small single-engine plane.  Before we started a quick call to the NTSB was made. They wanted to make sure we didn’t move any parts of the plane, and to document anything that did move.

It was pretty clear from the impression on the ground and the damage to the plane that it had come in vertically.  There was an impression from the propeller and nosecone that was about one foot deep. The leading edge of the wings had also left a clear impression in the dirt. The top of the cockpit had come off and the pilot was partially ejected with only his legs still inside. There had been no fire and the smell of aviation fuel was strong.  This was not a super high-speed crash that results in bodies being shredded, but similar to an automotive head on collision.

The body showed major trauma especially the arms and legs, but was more or less still in one piece.  The lower legs especially were completely crushed with bits of bone and muscle hanging out and the skin shredded. I found several pieces of bone inside the plane.  There was also a large hole in the chest with what looked like lung tissue hanging out.  Fortunately the victim was wearing a belt which gave us something to hold onto as we pulled him from the wreckage into the body bag.  Normally we use the arms and legs to move people, but in this case there was really nothing there to hold onto.

A Very Thoughtful Suicide

Gunshot wounds are usually messy. Especially if they are self-inflicted.  That is why I was so surprised by what I saw at one of our latest pickups.

The small trailer park had four police cars in front of it at 1 am when we got there. I identified myself and went inside to assess the situation.  Mobile homes are often difficult because of narrow hallways and ninety degree corners around which the gurney will not fit.  This mobile home had the typical narrow stairway leading the front door prohibiting the gurney. We would have to carry the body out the door.

My first impression of the scene was that of a typical elderly person who just dies. In this case she was in the kitchen on her back, and looking peaceful. I sat down at the kitchen table and filled out my paperwork.  It was not until I read the back of the yellow card (what the local law-enforcement use to record the details of a death) that I noticed a gun had been used. I looked at the body again and still saw no blood and no holes. I did however notice that plastic sheeting had been tacked to the wall in the corner. A closer look revealed a bullet hole through the plastic, the chair and the wall behind the chair, but still no blood.  After much searching I finally found a hole and burn mark on the dress in the middle of her chest. Neither my partner Roger or any of the police present had ever seen such a clean gunshot suicide.

She had left two notes, one for the emergency responders and one for her family, laid out all her bills and protected the walls with plastic. When we picked her up to put her in the body bag, there was only a small spot of blood on the kitchen floor.  I was amazed as even natural deaths often lead to blood and other body fluids leaking out onto the floor.  I guess that this elderly woman was a very thoughtful person and did not want to inconvenience anybody, even in death, and for that I say thank you.

Look What the Garbageman left

When the call came in at 7:00 am I was eating an Egg McMuffin at my desk.  All we know was that there had been a “crushing injury” to a garbage man. When we got there a few minutes later the ambulance was just leaving, with no lights or sirens. The fire truck was parked next to the garbage truck which was of the center load variety. A yellow plastic rain slicker had been draped over the center part of the truck where trash cans get emptied.  To really understand this situation it is important for the reader to get how this type of truck works. From the front of the truck you have the cab, just behind that you have a a large ram that is driven by two large hydraulic pistons. This ram sits in the center of the truck and garbage is dumped in this space and then pushed into the back of the truck (the hopper)  where the garbage is compressed and stored until it is emptied.  Every so often the operator must cycle the ram to push the trash he has just collected into the hopper. During that process there is a large cavity exposed in the middle of the truck. When this cycle is complete the ram draws back towards the front of the truck and that cavity is then occupied by the ram.

It is in this particular space that our adventurous garbage man decided to inhabit during the garbage compression cycle. It is my guess that he did not think through what happens at the end of that cycle. As we know, two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But in this case our garbage man was ultimately able to occupy two spaces at one time; that being his upper half and his lower half.  We found him more or less on his back in the center of the truck with his waist in a space not over 2 inches thick. Other than a little blood coming out of his mouth and nose, he could have been napping.  However one look under the truck and things did not look so well. His legs and everything that had been in his abdominal area was now on the ground.

Normally recovery of a body is simple. Arrive, place body in bag, fill out paperwork, leave. This time however, we had to figure out how to get the body out of the truck. We had to tie ropes to the victims arms and have another operator cycle the compactor to get his top half out. Once out it went in to body bag #1. Then we moved the truck and shoveled the guts into body bag #2 with his legs.  During all of this TV cameras were nearby trying to get some footage for the 5:00  o’clock news.

When we put the upper half into the bag, I noticed he had a fishing lure, a fly stuck on his leather glove. As I looked closer I noticed several more lures attached to his uniform just over the pocket. He may have been fishing, we’ll never know for sure.

Pulling Polly From The Wreckage

Most people think that ambulance drivers haul dead people away from auto accidents. In my county that is not the case.  A ride in an ambulance costs much more than a ride in the dead taxi since ambulance drivers must be trained to keep people alive. My skill set is different. I basically put a body in a bag and then haul it to the medical examiner and do a little paperwork so we know who is in which bag. So when the emergency medical responders show up at the scene of an accident and find a person who is irrevocably dead, they call me.

Traffic accidents are my favorite kind of call. I know that sounds twisted, but we have good calls and bad calls. For me a bad call is a decomp, or worse a large decomp with flies and maggots. But a good call is a really spectacular traffic accident. Its not that we enjoy death. Its just that we all have that innate curiosity as we drive by the scene of an accident. We all want to know what happened (except my wife).

So when we get the call and we roll up to an intersection surrounded by flashing lights, broken glass and twisted metal, there is a higher level of interest; almost excitement. That childhood curiosity is still there and it wants to see what’s under the sheet.  The police do their best to shield the scene from the public. They strategically place their cars to block the view of the dead. We pull around the stopped traffic and are waived into the heart of the wreckage.  I hop out and walk over to  a police officer. “So what are we looking at?” My standard question.  As he repeats what the witnesses have described we walk up to the mangled remains of what used to be a  Chevy truck.  I reach in and lift the sheet exposing a young woman, still belted into the passenger seat. The seat has been pushed  into the back seat. The fire department has already removed the door.

After we get the body bag and the gurney ready I cut the seat belt and get ready to lift her out of the car. My partner Roger and I each take one ankle and one wrist. As we pull, her jeans catch on a jagged piece of metal in the door frame.  We pull harder and the broken bones in the arm I am holding click and grind against each other.  We get her onto the open body bag which is on top of the gurney and I notice one of her shoes is missing. I think one shoe is nearly always missing in a fatal car accident. I put the hospital type bracelet on her ankle that has her name, social security number, location and date of death on it. Then I zip up the bag and seal the zipper for the medical examiner.

The police officer told me the driver had turned left directly in front of another truck traveling about 55 mph. The two cars ended up about 200 feet apart leaving a trail of glass and metal between them.  As we drive back to the medical examiner’s office I remind myself to take every opportunity to tell my wife and kids I love them. You never know which breath will be your last.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!