As Graham rolled the lady out of the bag, it was evident that she was fully dressed and her legs were wrapped in a blanket. This blanket had stuck to her body due to decomposition and it, too, was gently moving. As Graham pulled it back, another writhing ocean of maggots was exposed, more than I could ever have imagined in one place. I was not able to stomach any more at that point and was excused from the room. I ventured back into the office, where Clive was sitting at the computer on his desk. ‘Too much for you?’ he asked with that half-smile I was starting to know so well. I guess the fact that I was ashen and holding my breath at intervals to stop myself heaving gave the game away.
I was embarrassed, and thought this would be the end of my career as a Medical Technical Officer, but when, after ten minutes, I returned to the dissection room feeling slightly more in control of my breakfast, I was received by Graham and Dr Burberry with great compassion. This was not a job for the faint-hearted, and they both knew that. This was a job that, given a small amount of bravery and acceptance, becomes a day-to-day occurrence that you can get used to.
I went home that evening, collapsed on the sofa after our evening dog walk, and drifted off to sleep. I was woken suddenly by a dream of the decomposed body getting up off the table and coming out of the PM room to get me, maggots and all. I spent an hour that night after I woke thinking about whether I was going to return to the morgue the next day, as this did freak me out. But, me being me, curiosity got the better of my misgivings and I was back there at seven forty the next morning ready for the kettle clicking to tell me that it had boiled.
THIRTEEN
The smell had not died down the following day, but as I was let in I had a pleasant surprise: Clive presented me with a bunch of keys. After nine weeks or so I had earned the right to my very own set. Clive sat me down with a coffee and explained the importance of owning a set of keys to the hospital mortuary. This was big business to him, a sort of ceremony, and I finally felt part of the team. I also felt extremely chuffed that I had been given this responsibility so early into my new role, but scared at the same time. What, precisely, did this mean? I was about to be told.
I was aware that the mortuary had an on-call procedure, but that was all I did know; this state of ignorance was about to change, though, as I was going to be informed about everything you need to know to do on-call and be asked to participate. I had been led to believe that it was usual practice for a technician to be given a three-month trial period to see if they and the managers were happy with their progress; only then, if everyone was satisfied, were they expected to join the on-call rota. In my case, two months or so down the line and I was already being given my own set of keys to the department (only three sets existed in total) and being asked to come on to the rota. I had obviously made progress without realizing it.
Clive went on tell me how he was impressed by my attitude: the fact that I had returned after the retired GP episode apparently proved that I had what it takes. I could not say at the time that I agreed with this, but it meant a chance to prove myself so I was not about to argue. Clive went on to explain what my responsibilities would be when I was on call. After the mortuary was closed in the evening at four thirty, the switchboard would have my mobile number, and they would call me if I was needed. This would involve viewings of the deceased out of working hours if families requested it which, at that time, could be any time of the night. The policy has since changed (thank goodness) to a couple of hours added on to the end of the working day.
He went on to say, and at the time it was news to me but I soon became fully aware of it, that the public perception of a mortuary is that it is manned 24/7. This is understandable as the main hospital is staffed twenty-four hours a day and you would not expect a ward to be left unstaffed. He went on to tell me about how he had often been called out at ‘stupid o’clock’ in the morning for the family of a deceased relative who arrived drunk and then decided that they had changed their minds when they arrived. When we meet a family, we take them into the relatives’ waiting area, and when we are ready, they are invited into the viewing room to spend some time with the deceased. It is all done very smoothly (assuming that the family allow this), but there is a lot to do beforehand. It means getting into the mortuary in plenty of time before the family, making sure we are dressed in suitable clothing to present ourselves to the family, then getting the deceased out of the fridge. It is essential that you ensure that you have the right person for the right family (understandably, they can get very angry if you show them a dead stranger) and then you have the task of making the deceased presentable. Death sometimes has a horrible way of leaving a person looking unpeaceful, as I remembered from my first week with the old gentleman whose mouth was gaping and eyes were staring.
I asked Clive about this, and he decided that there was no time like the present, so he took me through to the body store and got a random body out of the fridge. It just so happened that this person had died with their eyes and mouth open. Clive went on to complain about this becoming more regular when a person died on the ward. There was and is in place the Trust’s ‘Last Offices’ policy that requires the ward to present the body to the mortuary in a suitable manner; this involves packing of cavities and, where possible, closing eyes. If this is done just after death then the eyelids will stay down but, if not, it becomes a problem. At least in this case, the fact that they hadn’t followed the policy had done me a favour, as Clive would be able to show me exactly what to do, but I could tell he was upset that the body had been sent to the mortuary from the ward in this way. He had high standards when it came to how the deceased should be treated. He didn’t seem to deal with the living too kindly, but at least he had great pride in his job.
He started to show me how to make things better. He got a pillow and placed it under the deceased’s head; he then got a head block and placed that under the pillow; raising the head this way caused the mouth to close. Next he got a tiny piece of cotton wool and some forceps; he placed the smallest amount of cotton wool on the eye and lifted the eyelid over it. This simple act caused the eye to stay closed. Clive preferred this to gluing the eyelids together with superglue – which some morticians do – and, I have to admit, I was immediately sold, so that it is a practice I still follow today. He told me about how his predecessor preferred to put an invisible stitch in the mouth, but that he considered such practices very invasive and preferred to see if he could solve the problems through other means. By the time Clive had finished, the deceased looked peaceful, as if he were sound asleep. To help with this, Clive had worked out the worry lines in the forehead by gently massaging them and straightened the mouth to a relaxed look. He made everything look so easy, and was rightly proud of his achievement.
It took Clive all of ten minutes to do this but what worried me was that, at least to begin with, I knew it would take me longer.
The switchboard was given my number and, as of the following week, I would be officially on call for the hospital. This went for the Coroner too, as I would also be working for him in a roundabout way; in turn, Clive added, that meant the possibility of having to do forensic post-mortems.
I had heard Clive and Graham mention forensic post-mortems before but didn’t really understand what they were. When I asked, Clive said, matter of factly, ‘You know, suspicious deaths, murders, that kind of thing.’
‘Murders?’ I began to panic.
Clive smiled. ‘Every now and again, Michelle, every now and again.’
FOURTEEN
The next week flew by, being only four days, but without a lot of PM work – although we had had several deaths through the doors, most of them had been expected and did not require autopsy – so we spent much of the week cleaning and I got to know Graham a lot better. Like Clive, he had also worked for the hospital for a long time; first as a porter, and then he’d stumbled across the job in the mortuary, initially helping Clive out when he needed it, then ending up as a permanent fixture. He also loved his job,
but was not interested in furthering his career. Now, what mortuary technicians do is a recognized profession and you are able to sit exams which, once you have passed them, will allow you to climb the ladder in the technician world. It will also allow you to work with national disasters if you choose; Clive had taken these exams, but all Graham wanted out of life was to do his job to the best of his ability, go home in the evening, enjoy his whisky without being disturbed, and collect his wages at the end of the month.
Graham also had a habit of sometimes using the wrong words. He would say ‘defiantly’ when he meant ‘definitely’, and ‘poignant’ when he meant ‘pertinent’, both of which I could understand, but not when he swapped ‘skellington’ for ‘skeleton’. Still, it just made him all the more human as far as I was concerned.
He was divorced, and had been for a long time. He told me about the many times he had had to climb out of the window at the nurses’ residence at some silly time in the morning, because the Sister was doing the rounds and he had been spending the evening with whichever nurse he was seeing at the time. It appeared that he had had liaisons with a large number of nurses – certainly lots of them spoke to him when we were out having a cigarette. He came across as a simple man, uncomplicated, who said exactly what he thought and knew what he liked and what he didn’t like, and nothing was ever going to change that. He would have his breakfast at the same time every morning – two rashers of bacon, fried eggs and toast (always the same) – and revelled in talking about what he was having for tea each evening, proud of the fact that he cooked it himself. Every morning Clive and I would have a running commentary on how good it had been and how he had cooked it. I found this both boring and intriguing: boring because I know how to cook, but intriguing because of the passion he displayed when telling me about it and the type of food he ate. No animal organ was safe from the frying pan in Graham’s kitchen. You name it, he had tried it, right down to sheep brains, which are very nice (or so he assured me). He offered to get me some next time he went to see his old mates at the abattoir, but I refused politely.
Graham also told me about his love of shooting, and I tried my best not to look shocked. I don’t think I did this very well, though.
‘I never shoot anything I don’t eat,’ he said quickly when he saw the reaction on my face. ‘Apart from when the farmer asks me to sort out any “mixies” I see when I walk his land; I don’t eat those buggers.’ I knew from this he was talking about rabbits with myxomatosis. ‘I just put the poor bleeders out of their misery; the foxes have those.’
I warmed to Graham; not because I agreed with some of the stuff he enjoyed doing – I didn’t at all – but because he was so straightforward and you knew where you stood with him. He also taught me a lot. Clive was a knowledgeable man, but his patience with me could be pushed sometimes. I am a very inquisitive person and have an annoying tendency to ask ‘Why?’ a lot. I like to have things explained to me, reasons given and what the end result is expected to be. I also like to know why I am asked to do something, but I am quite aware that this can really annoy people; I know this because people like me can annoy me! Graham, though, was always ready and willing to give me an answer or a reason. He was never flustered or agitated, but always gave a reply that was straight to the point, given in the language we both spoke, and without trying to impress or baffle me with long medical words that he knew I wouldn’t understand. We worked well together and appeared to complement each other, and I could see that Graham was like me in that he wanted to get the job done. Whatever task was given to him, he would jump on board.
By Friday I felt as though I was definitely part of the team and had been accepted. We started to relax fully with each other. And I loved the fact that the atmosphere was nothing like I imagined it would be. There was a strong sense of companionship, lots of helping each other out, lunches together in the office, jokes and gossip shared and plenty of laughing and high spirits. Working in a mortuary can be unpleasant; the sights that are brought through the doors are sometimes enough to make you want to turn around, walk out and never return. An attitude of extreme levelheadedness is important, and the attitude that Graham and Clive had was healthy as far as I was concerned. Although dealing with the deceased every day, they had never forgotten the fact that they were very much alive and lived each day to the full. The proper respect for the bereaved family and the dead was always there, but sometimes, given the normal everyday conversations and laughter that would come from the office over coffee, you would never have believed that we were completely surrounded by the dead and all their finery.
So, this week had been my first week on call, and the working week evenings had gone by without an emergency. I had actually turned my mobile phone on and off a few times and asked Luke to ring it to make sure it was working properly, which of course it was. From the stories relayed by Clive and Graham, I had thought it was going to be non-stop. This was about to change when Saturday morning arrived, however. The first phone call came around eight in the morning. It was the A&E department to say they had an elderly gentleman who had died in the ambulance on the way to be admitted. OK, I thought to myself, that is not a problem.
‘The trouble is,’ said the nurse on the end of the phone, ‘the family are coming down from Leeds.’
‘That’s fine,’ I replied. ‘What time are they going to be here?’
‘Could be any time. He was pronounced dead an hour and a half ago, we thought they would prefer to see him here, but they haven’t yet arrived and we can’t get hold of them to see how far away they are.’
I knew that this gentleman would probably have been transferred to the mortuary by now. I finished my phone call, left Luke and the dogs in bed and made my way to the mortuary at eight forty-five.
As I arrived, the porters were just bringing the patient over from A&E. I admitted him to our department and began making him presentable for his family. All the tricks Clive had showed me worked to perfection, and by nine thirty Mr Jenner was in the chapel, laid out in the proper manner and awaiting his visitors.
By eleven o’clock there was still no sign of his family. I had rung A&E a couple of times, but they had heard nothing. I had told pathology reception, which was manned until twelve on a Saturday, but they had had nobody wandering around looking lost.
In the time I had already waited, I had admitted a couple of other patients that had come in overnight, chatted with the porters for twenty minutes, drunk a fair few cups of coffee, run barefoot through the biscuit tin and read the local and national news on the internet. I then spent another fifteen minutes chatting to Gramp on my mobile about random stuff, but I could tell he was getting ready to go out and didn’t want to miss his bus, bless him. Luke had rung twice to see how long I was going to be, but I had told him to forget our plans for the day.
At twelve thirty, and still with no sign of Mr Jenner’s family, I decided I would have to ring Clive and take his advice on what to do. I had really hoped I could do this myself, if only to give him a break from the place, but needs must.
‘What do you mean, you’re still there?!’ was Clive’s response. ‘Michelle, put the body away and go home! If we sat waiting for every family that might want to come and visit a relative, we would have to have camp beds installed.’ I felt about an inch tall, my do-gooding had done no good at all for my staff relations. ‘You should always try to get a definite time and speak to the relatives direct. This is what happens when the ward arrange things for the morticians, our time gets wasted. I want you out of that mortuary within half an hour, Michelle. That’s an order.’
I finished my phone call and put Mr Jenner away in the body store. Luke said he would be outside at quarter past one to collect me. As we pulled up outside my house, I could hear Harvey and Oscar barking as they recognized Luke’s car. Just as I placed the key in the front door, my mobile rang. The family had arrived. So back to the hospital for the viewing that was supposed to have been hours ago. I met the family and they could not a
pologize enough.
So, after the formalities, Mr Jenner was met by his family at long last. I must have been able to hide my frustration, as I don’t think they noticed it. I explained to them, in a manner that I hoped was acceptable, that we really needed direct contact with them as we are not manned 24/7, and they apologized again. I showed them into the viewing room and left them to it, pointing out how to contact me if they needed me. There were four of them and they were there for each other, so my presence, I felt, would only get in the way.
I had told them how long I had waited for them, and thought this would mean they would take into consideration my time. How dare I be so selfish? Three hours later they were still with me. Five o’clock came and I had spent all day Saturday in the mortuary.
I have to admit I was annoyed. Not physically annoyed, but inside annoyed. That helpless feeling you have when you know you should not be angry because you have to consider how other people are feeling or accept them for what they are, and that it is not your place to say anything. But annoyed because you have not been considered in the whole picture, you are there and that is that. Apologies begin to mean nothing at that point and frustration takes over.
I finally left the mortuary at seven that evening. I never knew how much I enjoyed my weekends until they had been taken away from me.
Once again, Luke collected me from the hospital and I got home and collapsed on the sofa. My mobile, I wanted to throw in the bin. Being on call meant that when I relaxed a bit at home, I had to limit how much I drank. OK, I don’t drive, but I still have to be presentable and, if the evening needed it, attend for a forensic post-mortem should someone be so unlucky as to be murdered or fall foul of an ugly death.
Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician Page 6
