“You ever seen a spleen that large?”
“No…not since breakfast.”
- The Movie Fletch
One time I was in on an autopsy. When I say in on, I mean I was right there, gloved up and elbow deep. Let me tell you, it's not something you forget.
I worked at Saint Francis Hospital in Memphis for a decade. I got to know lots of doctors pretty well. One day I was chatting with one and he looked at his watch and said, “Oops, I gotta run. I've gotta do an autopsy.” I asked him what was the nature of that? He said he and two other doctors rotate doing them and it was his month. He asked me, “Would you ever want to be in on one?” “Well, sure…I guess so." It wasn't something I'd had on my list to ever do, but I wanted to be polite. “I'll call you when I have another one sometime.” he said, walking off down the hall.
In my mind, this wasn't really going to be a reality, “sometime” meant in some vague future, and probably never. The next morning I went into work and within minutes, our receptionist says, “Robert, you have a call on line two.” I pick up. It's the doctor, he says he has an autopsy to do right then, if I want to be involved, come down to room such and such. I said, “Okay” kind of hypnotically, and I tell the receptionist that I'd be out for a bit.
I walked down one of the halls to a nondescript door that I'd passed by hundreds of times but paid no mind to. I knocked and it opened. There stood a large, bearded, Santa Claus-looking man that I saw around the hospital all the time but didn't know his function. He was wearing a rubber apron. Realizing now what his job was, it dawned on me that, yes, he did have the countenance of a man who could eat a sandwich while sawing off the top of some cadaver's head. He motioned me in. I entered the low-ceilinged room, small, about the size of an average sized bedroom. There was the doctor standing over a naked man on an aluminum table. “Here you go.” he said, handing me an apron and some gloves.
Over the next hour or more, the doctor and Santa Claus and I took this fellow apart. He was in his late seventies, the paperwork said. He had died that morning. We dug through him, examined and weighed all his internal organs and checked his heart and arteries for issues. Santa did, in fact, saw off the top of his head and we looked over his brain. Even though it was all business, there was a solemnity involved, a reverence to what we were involved in. If I remember right, an aneurysm was what did the fellow in.
All the time in that room, I was in kind of a dream-like state. I mean, a half hour earlier, I was having oatmeal for breakfast at home and now there I was with some guy's liver in my hands. Was I really doing this? Was I supposed to be doing this? After the job was finished, I took off my gloves and apron, washed up and walked back down the hall to work. “We'll you won't believe what I just did.” I told my coworkers.
This was 1994. Needless to say, it was a looser time. No way something that casual could happen today. That's why those were better days.
The next day, I read in the Memphis' daily paper, The Commercial Appeal (this was when you read an actual newspaper) the man's obituary. The guy who I'd helped dismantle the day before had had a very ordinary life, wife and kids, a fine man, it said. It was hard to process it all. I never have, fully.