#but also i didnt get to any placentas today so :/

[wetslug]

i was sooo productive at work boss asked if i was exaggerating my workload at the end of the day. no girl im just insane

[enchantedpendant]

a (not-so-accurate) depiction of me during my first autopsy earlier today

under the cut: descriptions of gore

several minutes before 8am after nearly losing my mind in the traffic jam (inside the hospital area, imagine!), we were told that we had a body to examine.

a body was found on a railroad and the police brought it over earlier in the morning. it was a 49 year old man, identified and we had a copy of his ID (he was stated to be married), but no one came for him. somehow i ended up being the documenter and took all photos, every step of the way, on my phone. the body was inside of two layers of black bags. we unzipped the bags and... well, as expected from a body ran over by a train, it was a mess. all that's left of the left leg was half a femur bone and the muscles, fasciae, adipose tissues, and torn skins (barely) enveloping it. the skull was crushed, cerebral contents spilled, blood from every orifice. a big rip on the lower left abdomen down to the genitals, intestines spilled out. the face was deformed, mandible dislocated, you could barely imagine how the body looked while alive (and somehow i think this helps me not get too spooked out by it? like maybe my brain could barely recognize the body in front of me as a dead human?). ribs, pelvic bones, all crushed, sharp and crepitated. ya get the idea. there were pants, underpants, a t-shirt, and a hoodie on the body, all torn (obviously). we had to cut it off of it. the body was on its front so we had to roll it over onto its back, thats when we really saw how much blood there was and thats when the smell finally hit. we documented each wounds (i photographed it all on my phone). and then we stitched the body up. there were a lot to stitch up so we shared. i got to work on the hole on the abdomen, put the intestines inside and stitched along the inguinal line.

i sure hope what im gonna say doesnt sound weird, but i felt happy when i got done stitching it up and saw how much tidier the body looked than before we started working on it. i like to think that we did what little good we could do to this man who had met his very unfortunate end. forensics is one of the few departments here that do not have their own residency, so a lot of the works are delegated directly to the med students. so ig this was... the most hands-on i've been on a patient. i also feel like i want to thank the man for "allowing" us to work on his body and learn a lot from him. obviously i dont know anything about him aside from his identity and that he died around midnight ran over by a train, but i'd like to put aside theories of what could possibly lead up to that moment and think that he was a good person, or at the very least, at the end of his life, he did a good thing and gave us a good lesson.

personally i feel like today's experience also served as a humbling reminder of death. how close it really is, how we never really know when it's coming for us. how inevitable it is. we can't really try to not die, but ig we could try to die in a way we wouldn't mind. i noticed i was a lot more careful when i drove back home today, i thought i didnt want to end up nor cause anyone else to end up in such a... messy end.

anyways, in case anyone read this far: be careful! be careful on the road, regardless if you're walking or on any sort of vehicle. be careful around railroads! stay safe!

(oh and also i immediately moved all the photos to the laptop of my friend who was currently on duty lol i'd rather not traumatize my future self or any poor soul who's gonna look through my phone gallery with some surprise gore)

(and ive also been thinking about how i barely blinked at this whole.. no, this unwhole body, but got my head spinning and was so close to puking at the mere sight of a placenta during a c-section. like what is it about the placenta?? i remember it being like a large jiggly bloody jelly and UGH i lowkey get a bit light-headed just describing it lol. again doubting my possibility for a future in obgyn.)