Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Dead on Arrival (or at least they’d better be)

I’ve never really given too much thought to autopsies. Pretty much everyone I’ve been close to who has died was either very sick or very old or very both. No need to cut and paste that cadaver. No, ah, sweet mystery of death, at last I’ve found you moments to be had. No sue the bastards urges.

When I ship out – and, goofily, I was going to write “if and when I ship out….” (hah! such hubris; I really do know that it’s definitely a “when” not an “if”) – if there’s some suspicion that someone laced my tea with arsenic, or if some Greater Scientific Cause will be furthered by evaluating my no longer useful blood and guts, well, have at it.

Other than that, dead is gone, as far as I’m concerned.

Not that I don’t find autopsies interesting. I’m a cop show watcher, and I like nothing better than one of my cops paying a call on the morgue.

I actually got to see an autopsy once – just not a human one.

My husband and I, at the time, were frequent visitors (and donors) to the San Diego Zoo, and made friends with a few of the folks there. We were visiting the lab of a researcher when she mentioned that they were going to be doing an autopsy on a baby elephant who’d been accidentally gored.

Well, as it happened, my husband had always wanted to see a baby elephant, and I’d always wanted to see an autopsy, so we managed to wangle an invitation.

We only stayed through part of it.

Frankly, it wasn’t the formaldehyde that got to me. After all, we were in San Diego, and the autopsy was conducted in some sort of shelter that was completely open on one side, so the air was definitely breathable.

No, it was the sight of the baby elephant’s trunk, hanging over the side of the lab table, that got to us.

Still, if someone invited me to an animal or human autopsy, I’d be interested. (Not if I knew the animal or human, however.)

What I wasn’t aware of is that there are private companies that provide autopsy services. And if you’d like your love one to get a posthumous poke and prod, you can get one of them to take care of it for you.

I know this thanks to the Wall Street Journal, which always manages to come through with a topic that interests me, when I am in that desperate hour, trying to figure out what the next day’s post is going to be about.

Who knew you could just call 1-800-Autopsy? (They’re in LA, and I’m wondering whether they have a jingle as memorable as 1-800-54-GIANT, which everyone in Massachusetts knows to call when they have a broken windshield.  Or as nifty as the jingle of my childhood that impressed upon me – and every other child growing up within ear-shot of Boston television stations – all they needed to know about dirty rugs. How many cookies did Andrew eat? Andrew ate 8,000?  How do you keep your carpets clean? Call AN-drew 8-8000. Which is still, after all these years, the phone number for Adams and Swett Rug Cleaning. Pretty good marketing on the part of both Giant Glass and Adams and Swett. Talk about staying power!)

Anyway, 1-800-Autopsy does about 600 postmortems per year – not just for civilians, but for locales that can’t afford their own medical examiners.  (Is there anything these days that can’t be outsourced? At least autopsies aren’t being off-shored… Yet.)

An autopsy will run you in the $3K range.

"We give voice to the deceased," says Vidal Herrera, who founded 1-800-Autopsy with his wife, Vicki, in 1988. "We allow them to tell their stories…because it's all there on the table in the tissue and blood."

They’re consistent with their messaging around giving a voice to the deceased. Their tag line is The Deceased Must Be Protected and Given a Voice.

Decomposing that tagline, we certainly don’t want dead bodies dragged through the streets, getting pecked by vultures, or otherwise violated, but, realistically speaking, there’s not much you can do to actually protect the dead in any meaningful way. They actually, ahh, don’t really need it anymore.

And I don’t know about that giving a voice to the deceased.

I thought that was what Ouija Boards, séances, dreams, and hallucinations are for. (Remind me to tell you at some point about the dream I had about my Grandfather Rogers’ coffin being opened.  I never laid eyes on him, dead or alive – he died 25 years before I was born – and I didn’t see him in the dream coffin, either. The coffin did contain a very elaborate flagon, that contained a nectarish wine. Which makes some sense, given that he ran a saloon.  The dream was a lulu, by the way.)

What I found interesting in the WSJ article was the fast-fact that, in 1965, 42% of hospital deaths were autopsied. Nowadays, the figure’s down to 2%. (Don’t know what that’s all about, but I’m guessing that there are a lot more deaths in the hospital these days.)

…autopsies are generally only conducted if there's evidence of a crime or threat to public health

Family members can ask for an autopsy, but if they get turned down – which it sounds like’s gonna happen if there’s nothing crime- or public-health related – they can turn to a private autopsy outfit.

"People that are hurting need to find closure, pursue litigation or even get a second opinion," says Mr. Herrera, a former autopsy technician and crime-scene investigator for the Los Angeles County coroner's office.

Hmmm. Which do you think is to top reason? Find closure, pursue litigation, or just get a second opinion?  (Does the second opinion ever come back that Great Uncle Arthur is not dead?) 

Me, I’d bet on “pursue litigation.”

If you’re looking for a new career, by the way, 1-800-Autopsy sells franchises. But don’t get any ideas about a correspondence course from Famous Autopsies School: you have to be a licensed MD to conduct one.

When Mr. Herrera  isn’t kept busy with his autopsies and franchisees, he:

…builds couches out of coffins in his spare time as a way to make light of his morbid line of work. "It's something you have to do because it's business."

Oh, why not.

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