Autopsy Anyone?

There are a few common questions that I get asked when I tell people that I am interning in the morgue. The first most common question is: "What is the most disgusting/gruesome/grossest/etc. thing that you have seen?" Another common question is: "Doesn't it make you sad or depressed seeing all those dead people?" With that question people like to toss around the words "innocent" and "tragedy." Another very common question I get asked is: "Do you ever lose your appetite? or Do you ever feel like throwing up?" I think I will address this third question because its fun to relate food and pathology.

The only problem I had with food was with my first bad decomp case. The smell stuck with me all day and I could taste it in my mouth. The only thing I could eat was some white rice (actually white rice kind of looks like maggots... yum), but that was hard because everything tasted like decomp. After that one time I have had no problems with food. Yes, human muscle does look like a type of steak and liver looks like the liver you would buy in the grocery store (thats just plain disgusting) and when it is cut up, it looks like cubed pieces of beef you would use in a stew or shish kabob. The aorta looks like a piece of pasta when it is opened and cleaned off. Postmortem blood clots look like grape jelly. Decomposing brain looks and has the texture of cake batter. And then there is the fun of actually fishing through the gastric contents (in other words, vomit). You can find all sorts of goodies by fishing through the contents of the stomach. It is sometimes a fun game to try and guess what the decedent's last meal was. And don't even get me started on the many different types of bowel contents (poopey, for all you refined folks out there). Let me just say that you know when a person had Mexican food before he or she died. So, I have no problem with loss of appetite. I even eat my lunch in the morgue with bodies that are being autopsied in front of me (shhh, don't tell OSHA. They don't want us eating in the autopsy room.). As I have said, it is the talent of pathologists and morgue personnel to be able to describe everything in terms of food (actually a lot of doctors do this in medical school) and still be able to enjoy those foods.

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Now how's that?