anatomise

Aspiring Mortician and Anatomical Artist. Follow me as a start a new career in dissecting the dead. I also run an Etsy store for my art Instagram: @anatomise_ window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-121243276-1');

[anatomiseblog]

l e t s . t r y . t h i s . a g a i n

It’s quite apparent I’ve been lacking in the blogging department. Life got a bit all over the place recently which made it hard to sit down and focus on getting my thoughts out on a page. None of it bad, which I’m happy to say is a first when it comes to how life usually treats me. I’ve been busy with job applications, interviews and, finally getting employed by the NHS as a Mortuary and Bereavement Assistant! As you can probably guess, I’m extremely happy to finally be on the road to becoming a qualified APT. The past 5 months with the guys in Harlow have been amazing but bills need to be paid and volunteering, as rewarding as it is, just isn’t sustainable. 

I learned so much in my time in Harlow, all the basics of running a mortuary but also how to treat the people we work with on a day to day basis. Giving a helping had to funeral directors, having a laugh and a joke with the pathologists and most importantly, how to talk to bereaved families when they call up asking for an update. I’ve loved my time there, I couldn’t have asked for a better team to teach me and send me on my way to start my dream career. 

I joined the Lister team this past Tuesday. I spent my first morning where I’ve been craving to be since April, down on the PM room floor helping to weigh organs, washing the deceased and marking down any external injuries and distinguishing features on a body map. I came out of that PM room needing to change my scrubs and have a shower, yes, I got my hands (obviously gloved) dirty! We had some interesting cases and being able to be up close and not up on the observation gallery was amazing. To really see the pathology, the differences of healthy tissue on one case and then the diseased tissue on the other was so interesting, solidifying why I want to do what I want to do. 

The rest of the week was spent in the bereavement office, dealing mostly with hospital deaths and searching through patient notes to find out if they needed a referral to the coroner. If a death in the hospital has happened within 24hrs of them being admitted, if they had a surgery in the last 3 months or if the patient had a fall, they must be referred to the coroner. If the coroner is happy, no post-mortem is needed, but if not an inquest is started. It’s been really insightful to be able to see this process from start to finish, from bereavement to mortuary. Although, this does have its challenges. When in the mortuary, you try not to give the deceased a personality, a life, you still treat them with dignity and respect but to allow yourself not to get emotionally involved you have to remove the life that they had. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s hard, but to protect your mental health you leave your emotions at the mortuary door. But now imagine, you’ve just finished meeting a family or just gotten off the phone to a relative or partner who is distraught about a death that’s just happened and but they’re telling you about the good times they’ve had with them, how much they’ll miss them. Then the next day you're assisting in the post-mortem room, and they’re loved one is laid out in front of you. Or even imagine it the other way round, the relative calls up for an update and yesterday you had their heart in your hands. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job and although I have somethings to get used to, I only think it’ll help to make me a stronger, more caring person. But, the PM room is where I belong!

Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep this up again, I’ll try for every Sunday. No guarantees though!

Rosie May x

[anatomiseblog]

d a y  f i v e

I now had to come to terms with the fact that I found corpses interesting. This was something altogether more challenging than I had realised. Did this make me some psycho or would it turn me into some mass murdering psychopath. If I was even thinking these things, what would everyone else think of me? Would it be easier to keep this all a secret until I had a job and then just say I worked in a hospital, that’s what everyone else in the industry were telling people. 

No, I just couldn’t do that. After seeing these bodies my whole outlook on life changed, I no longer wanted to waste my life hiding who I was and I was no longer going to let my anxiety hold me back. This is exactly what I wanted to do and I didn’t want to hide it from anyone. I wanted to be able to share how all of this has changed me and made me appreciate my body for the beautiful machine it is. I just needed to gain the courage to do just that. 

After calling around some more mortuaries and again being turned down over and over again, I got through to a place that was willing to help. This is when all my luck changed. I was invited to come down and spend the morning with them and meet the team. They didn’t have any current jobs going but may do in the future and having the experience of going in and spending sometime with them would only help my chances for when it came up. He asked me if I wanted to observe a full post mortem and I jumped at the opportunity, of course I wanted to! So we arranged at date and time for me to come down.

It was an early morning for me, up at 5am and out of the door by 6, only time for one coffee and one cigarette. When I arrived I was welcomed at the door by the man I had been talking to and who had invited me down. He was a lovely happy soul and he instantly made me feel at ease. My anxiety was running high at this point knowing full well what I was about to see but he and the team we so lovely and welcoming my anxiety started to drift away. 

After having a quick chat with everyone I was asked to change into scrubs. YES! Finally I was in proper scrubs, a dream I had since I was a little girl. They were burgundy and so comfy, it was like wearing pjs in work. After I was changed we went through to the post mortem room. 

This was much more organised and clean than the other one I went to. As soon as you walked in there was a sterile space and then over a half-wall/tiled bench was the pm room. I was given a surgical gown to put on along with a plastic apron and given a pair of wellies as well and a face shield. After putting all of this on we scooted over the tiled bench and were now fully in the pm room. 

[patgavin]

Abandoned Autopsy Lab

[anatomiseblog]

d a y  f o u r

I’d found it, my life long career; performing autopsies. The trouble was, I’d never seen a dead body so I didn’t know how I would react. Of course I’d seen them in true crime documentaries but it’s nothing like seeing it in person and of course you can’t smell anything through a screen. I had the same words go through my head that I’ve heard countless times on tv shows, “once you see it you can’t un-see it”. Will it effect me as much as these people say it will? Will it forever change me? The only way I would ever know was to just go and do it, I mean, I couldn’t just end this all right now. 

I started enquiring at mortuaries to see if they had any suitable positions available. I was mostly faced with grumpy managers who wouldn’t even give me the time of day. I had gone down my whole list of phone numbers and had given up hope, there was one left. I had already assumed it would be a no so I didn’t give it much hope, but I called anyway. It started off as they all had done, the other party being quite on guard and me being happy and cheerful, and by the end of the call he wanted me to come down to meet him the same afternoon. 

I was excited yet extremely anxious. I was going for a sort of interview with only 2 hours notice, what do I even wear to a mortuary? And then it dawned on me, I might see a dead body today and I didn’t know what to think. Obviously, this is the major point in this career and if I freak out or puke then all this has meant nothing. If I can’t handle seeing somebody dead then this definitely isn’t the right career for me, and I’m back at square one. 

We talked for two hours about everything and anything. I think he was just trying to gauge my character as at this moment in time he didn’t have a job for me but there might be one in the future. As I assumed, he asked why. I gave him my honest answer “I love anatomy and I think the human body is beautiful” and that seemed to appease him. He then asked the big question, “have I ever seen a dead body before?”, and I truthfully told him no. He and I knew exactly what that meant, I’m trying to get into this industry without even having experienced the main focus. 

He stood up and asked me to follow him. I knew exactly what was going to happen. This was it, the first time I will ever see a dead body, a corpse, a cadaver, and all my past thoughts were going through my head. What if I do freak out and make a complete idiot of myself, making our 2 hour conversation irrelevant. 

It was the complete opposite. When I first stepped into the post mortem room I stopped in my tracks to take it all in, it was so strange. Quiet and peaceful yet odd and unnerving. We are so used to seeing people moving, with colour in their skin, but these people were stiff and pale. It takes a minute for your mind to comprehend what you’re seeing, it’s just not used to it. These people weren’t just lying there either, they were in the middle of having an autopsy. Abdomens open and brains out.

After the initial shock wore off, I became excited and so fascinated by the scene that was in front of me, I wanted to go over and see everything in more detail. I started to smile and the man that lead me there knew instantly this was right for me. I guess most peoples reaction to seeing someones empty skull isn’t to want to go over and get a closer look. But this was mine. 

[anatomiseblog]

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[doctorforensic]

Normal heart from a recently deceased individual without formaldehyde fixation.

[doctorforensic]

Frontal and temporal contusional hematomas associated with a falling impact to the back of the head in an individual with liver disease.

[doctorforensic]

Packets of drugs discovered at autopsy in individuals who died in hotels next to an airport. Note the broken packets at the bottom picture.

[doctorforensic]

Pitting edema of the leg due to congestive heart failure.

[kipkinkel]

Introduction to Autopsy

The autopsy is designed to determine the cause of death, the mechanism of death, and the manner of death. In some cases, the cause of death cannot be determined, due to various reasons, including decomposition.

 Cause of Death – is usually defined as the injury or disease that caused the death of an individual. Stab wounds, gunshot wounds or blunt force trauma are all causes of violent death.

Mechanism of Death – is defined as what directly caused the death to occur. An example is hemorrhage. A gunshot wound might not be fatal in and of itself, but if the victim bleeds to death, loss of blood becomes the mechanism of death.

Manner of Death – is defined as “How the death occurred”. Such examples are homicide, accidental, suicide and natural. In addition, when necessary, a medical examiner may write “Undetermined” under this section of the autopsy report.

[anatomiseblog]

d a y  t h r e e

No anatomy. This was the main reason I wanted to enter the medical field so going into the funeral industry wasn’t an option. I was now back at square one, where do I go, what field do I enter and how do I get there? 

After days of searching anatomy courses and different branches of medicine I came across something that seemed almost too perfect. Why had I never thought of this? It had never even crossed my mind that this was actually a career that was somewhat reachable, and doable. For someone that had shut down ever going into healthcare, this was a job that required no medical background, no specific entry requirements, no going back to college or university yet I could spend my days admiring the human body.

It was an epiphany moment. I had found it. The thing that would tie all my personal interests into one job, one life long career. A job that I knew I would be truly passionate about and enjoy for the rest of my life. Preforming autopsies. 

This was it, I had found it and now I was so driven to make this happen but where do I start? I researched this job everyday late into the nights, it was all I could think about, but I was scared. What would people think about me? Would they understand why I wanted to do this, should I even tell them? Luckily my boyfriend supported me and encouraged this new path, but I couldn’t even bare to tell my friends, let alone my mum. 

When it came time to tell her I didn’t know how she would react. You’d think with her being a doctor, going to medical school and learning anatomy on cadavers she would understand my interest and be supportive in the fact that I wanted to somewhat follow her foot steps. This was not the case. I was faced with the question I was expecting from everyone I was thinking of telling. “Why would you want to spend your days with the dead?”. All I heard from this is “something is seriously wrong with you if you want to cut up dead people as your career”. 

I had to come to terms with the fact that not everyone will understand and some people may think I’m strange, but the thing is, people have already thought that about me. It soon dawned on me that I can’t let the idea of other peoples opinions about me affect the way I live my life, they will think what they want to think, but I have to be happy with me. I had found exactly what I was meant to do with my life and nothing or anyone was going to stop me. 

[anatomiseblog]

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[anatomiseblog]

d a y  t w o

I knew that heading down the medicine route was the right thing for me to do. I had always had a passion for anatomy and kept skulls and anatomical images around my room. I knew I wanted to work in a hospital, wear scrubs everyday and be able to study human anatomy, but that was it. There are so many different directions to go in, I was overwhelmed when thinking of what field was right for me. Do I go back to school and get a degree in medicine? Or if I don’t go back to school, do I settle for an admin job? 

I searched job websites for any entry level job in a hospital or medical field. After searching for months, something came up that peaked my interest, something I had never even thought of before. Embalmer. 

I knew the basics of what the role entails from watching a YouTube channel called Ask A Mortician. From watching her videos I had become comfortable talking about death and even made some decisions about my own death, but strangely, I had never thought about working in the death care industry. Not until I had seen Embalmer listed on my Indeed search. Why had it never occurred to me? I love anatomy, skulls, bones, organs, horror films, Dexter Morgan, true crime documentaries and autopsy videos. Yet I’ve never once given thought to having a career in this field, I didn’t even know if you needed qualifications or at least, a medical degree. Turns out, you don’t.

I did some more research into death care, and embalming just didn’t fit. I mean, why would I embalm anyone when I myself don’t want to be embalmed when I die? And then funeral director came up. Now, this wouldn’t be a bad option. It has it pros: dealing with the dead, helping families and wearing black on a day to day basis, but I think I’m just too awkward for something so formal and one obvious down side is: no anatomy. 

[anatomiseblog]

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[anatomiseblog]

d a y  o n e

For as long as I can remember I've had a fascination with the human body. Obsessed with my mothers medical books, I would look through pages and pages of skin diseases entranced by how they looked and how they could've happened. Some days I would try and miss school just to be able to go to work with her, unfortunately with her being a doctor I was frequently unsuccessful in my lies of not being well enough to go. The days when I was successful were filled with playing with stethoscopes, laying on examination beds, drawing with drug rep pens on drug rep sticky notes, surrounded by hundreds of patient files and the coming and go of medical aliments. I loved this, not just because I could spend the day with my mum but because it was all so interesting to me. As time went on and as I drifted through school life I was torn between two paths; going down the medical or scientific route or following another passion. Music. I had seen my mum struggle with her career for many years because of lack of free time and late nights. There were nights when I would have to come in the car with her to attend patient houses because she was on call. I could see she found it difficult to be away from me so much and how the stress of her job was affecting her. I didn't want this for me. I didn't want to resent my job, I wanted it to be fun and something I enjoyed doing and it seemed as if a life in medicine would be none of those things. So I went down a route of creativity, focusing on media and photography to hopefully lead into a career in the music industry. I pursued this path for the rest of my educational life, putting too much of my time and money into something that never materialised. This was such a difficult time in my life, I knew what I wanted but after getting knocked back repeatedly I wasn't willing to push myself anymore.I was going through medical issues and sunk down into a deep depression. I no longer knew where I was going or what I wanted to do. I had no drive and no passion for anything I used to care so much about and that's when it nearly all came to an end. The turning point came when I had a car accident. After losing my car and feeling pretty sorry for myself I knew I couldn't just keep coasting by, I needed to find something more purposeful to do with my life. I started creating anatomical art work and once again looking at medical books, and I allowed myself to reconsider a life in medicine. I didn't know in what area but I knew that this was the right direction to be going.