Oh, The Humanity
My friends often wonder how i do my job. i work in a big hospital, and my day job is working with death and dying (i'm a social worker.) my moonlighting gig is on-call work for the ER and the rest of the hospital. if some child is abused, anyone gets raped, or some osrt of domestic violence, i'm awakened from my slumber to tend to matters. the day-to-day stuff doesn't get to me. but yesterday, the hospital did.
I've been to the morgue many times. i've handled a dead baby before. i've seen a million dead people. dead people don't scare me. and i really do see them, but not in a walking and talking kind of way. i have all kinds of concerns, like how long they've been lingering in a hospital room dead, because we (the nurses, not me) need to get 'em cleaned before rigor sets in. or before they start to smell like rotting death. i'm often the one who has to escort crying family away so that the corpse can be tended to. i also have to take people down to the morgue to see their loved ones. this is always something i discourage. the morgue is not a fun place. but no matter how many times i explain to people that they really should wait until the funeral home to see their dead mother looking like herself, they still want to go down there.
Yesterday, a 74 year old died suddenly in the ER. the family wanted to go see her. the 'body' (really only her little head peeking out of the gross white plastic bag all bodies get stored in in the meat-locker-esque slots in the morgue) was ready, but the family walked really slowly, and a funeral home director beat us to claim another body. so i had to wait in the hall with the sobbing family. something i hadn't realized before is that bodies get hauled around with big chains in the morgue, to lift them off the slabs, onto the funeral directors' gurneys. this makes a whole lot of disturbing, torture-chamber noise.
But after ten minutes that was all over, and i took the family in for a view of the dead woman's head. (i lovingly picked off all the stray hospital-sheet white threads from her chin and brow, prior to the viewing...) imagine lots of crying, beating on the walls, yelling... and all this before 11am.
My day was bound to get better, right? well, little did i know, it was only just beginning.
I've been to the morgue many times. i've handled a dead baby before. i've seen a million dead people. dead people don't scare me. and i really do see them, but not in a walking and talking kind of way. i have all kinds of concerns, like how long they've been lingering in a hospital room dead, because we (the nurses, not me) need to get 'em cleaned before rigor sets in. or before they start to smell like rotting death. i'm often the one who has to escort crying family away so that the corpse can be tended to. i also have to take people down to the morgue to see their loved ones. this is always something i discourage. the morgue is not a fun place. but no matter how many times i explain to people that they really should wait until the funeral home to see their dead mother looking like herself, they still want to go down there.
Yesterday, a 74 year old died suddenly in the ER. the family wanted to go see her. the 'body' (really only her little head peeking out of the gross white plastic bag all bodies get stored in in the meat-locker-esque slots in the morgue) was ready, but the family walked really slowly, and a funeral home director beat us to claim another body. so i had to wait in the hall with the sobbing family. something i hadn't realized before is that bodies get hauled around with big chains in the morgue, to lift them off the slabs, onto the funeral directors' gurneys. this makes a whole lot of disturbing, torture-chamber noise.
But after ten minutes that was all over, and i took the family in for a view of the dead woman's head. (i lovingly picked off all the stray hospital-sheet white threads from her chin and brow, prior to the viewing...) imagine lots of crying, beating on the walls, yelling... and all this before 11am.
My day was bound to get better, right? well, little did i know, it was only just beginning.
posted @ 2:25 PM
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