Trip to the Medical Examiner’s Office

I got to visit the Medical Examiner’s Office.  That place is the source of death records and other evidence if you get there in time.  I say that because after ten days, claimed bodies get cremated.

I’ll just get right to it and say it now.  I saw a corpse after its autopsy.  The head and chest was cut wide open.  The brains and the chest organs were gone.  It was incredibly disgusting.  Many of my classmates said the body looked fake, but that was a real corpse.  In the flesh… lol the ripped open flesh. 

The more exciting part of this trip was definitely the morgue and the toxicology lab.  The more important part of the trip would probably be in the records room, which was coincidentally room 119.  Each file is color-coded by cause of death.  I thought that was pretty neat.  I think the homicide victims had a red tab on the folder, yellow was suicide, etc.  There were others but I don’t remember which color went to what type of death.

When we visited the toxicology lab where they test to see how someone died, there wasn’t really anything going on.  I just saw a lot of big, high-tech machines built to test the flesh.  I even heard that the lab has small amounts of every drug, including the illegal ones.  The drugs are only there to test the overdose corpses to see what kind of drug it died from.

The juicy part of the trip was obviously the morgue.  We got to see a dead body, yay.  My class was stoked to see it.  I’ve heard this advice in just about every journalism course I’ve taken and it goes along the lines of, “You’re gonna see a lot of blood.  You better have a stomach for it.”

I was very proud of all my classmates.  Only one was about to throw up after being in the morgue but it wasn’t at the sight of the corpse but it was the smell of what I like to call the “meat cooler.”  After we saw the corpse a bunch of classmates wanted to see where the rest of the dead bodies are kept.  I thought it wasn’t necessary.  We just saw an explicitly grotesque corpse with its chest cut wide open.  But we humans, are never satisfied. 

I was still staring at the corpse when the rest of the class went over to the meat cooler.  As soon as they opened the door, the smell of death just filled the room.  Ugh, it was so nasty.  It smelled like rotten chicken that has been in the trash for days (I’ll never make that mistake again).  It just stunk!  I decided not to go into the cooler because I wasn’t that desperate to see a whole bunch of dead bodies.  The smell was so pungent I just walked out of the morgue without the rest of the class along with another student covering his mouth and nose obviously about to toss his cookies.  I’ve been having some bad morning sickness (no, I’m not pregnant) over the past week and I just didn’t want to take any chances with my weak stomach.  I hope the poor guy didn’t throw up, though. 

The lesson I learned is obviously I need to have a strong stomach as a journalist and if I wanna know more about how a person died, I have to go to the Medical Examiner’s Office.