I See Dead People

Well, I don't, but my husband does. Yesterday Zachary got to had to go observe autopsies at the Maricopa County Examiner. Maybe I watch too much Law and Order: SVU (I love that show), but I was really interested to hear what it was like in real life since we always see them on some of our favorite shows like NCIS. Basically, he said they looked exactly like how they do on TV.

He said it was crazy how fast they do the autopsies. Each autopsy only takes about 30-40 minutes and they were doing about 4 at a time. Zach and the other students were able to watch from behind windows, and he said it was really hard seeing the first one, but then it got easier. He got to see a ton of different cases, each one unique, but no homicides. Fun Fact: I guess if you witness the autopsy of a homicide, then you can be called on to the stand during trial to testify, so they weren't allowed to view those ones.

Zach was definitely in kind of a funk the rest of the day, which is totally understandable. I can't imagine having that as my day job... kind of depressing and sad to see so much death all the time. But, I guess if you are into how the body works it might be intriguing to figure out the cause of some one's death through science. I can see how it would be satisfying to help families and loved ones get closure.

Unfortunately, he didn't get to hear the results of any of the cases because it takes a few days/weeks to process some of the testing results. Oh, a day in the life of a med student...

Speaking of Law and Order... check out this website where people take the one sentence description of a Law and Order episode and make art out of it. It's pretty cool.