The Ugliness that You Don't See on TV · 6:08am Feb 17th, 2017
Hollywood just doesn't convey what I do for a living.
Had a bad one today. Homeless man had his camp catch on fire. He was cognizant enough to try to run out of it before he collapsed and burned to death. No ID, no friends to give the PD a lead on an ID, and I've garnered a (imho, somewhat unjustified) reputation for victim identification in the hopeless cases, so I got called in.
You'd think that, after twenty years on this job, it wouldn't bother me. But it still does. Burning to death is one of the worst ways to die I can imagine - the only thing that comes to mind is an old-school Baptist preacher's fire-and-brimstone sermon come to life in an eternity of agony, compressed into however long this poor bastard lived his final moments. I deliberately didn't ask the pathologist how long he would have lived after the fire caught him - I don't think I would have liked her answer.
My family is from Kansas City - barbecue is a thing with us. But, burn victims smell like barbecued meat - overlaid with gasoline in car crashes, with plastics, wood, and paint in house fires, but barbecue underlies it all. I don't vomit, but that smell adds to the horror.
The skin was hanging off of him in crisp shreds. The pathologist and I traded bad jokes as we tried to dissect the hands to get to the skin of the fingers. I call it, "forensic machismo" - we use that dark humor as a defense mechanism, so we can pretend it doesn't bother us. Deep inside, though... it does. I don't know anyone who isn't affected at some level by this. I don't think I want to know anyone who truly isn't affected. So, we trade bad jokes and do our jobs anyway. The job is ugly, sometimes. We do it anyway. Because it's important. Because this man, once upon a time, had a family that loved him. Because he needs to come home to them.
Maudlin? Sentimental? Maybe. Do what I do, without the multi-million-dollar special effects department, and get back to me on that.
So, I'm going to spend a little time reading about Technicolor cartoon horsies. And, tomorrow, I'm going to examine the skin tissue we salvaged, and try to discover who this man was. So he can go home.
/hug
/hug so, so many times.
I don't even want to be able to imagine, so /hug again.
I did the same thing when my cat died. Shortly after getting home from the animal hospital - so, like an hour after her seizure - I was petting my roommate's cat and told it, "Well, you won." My roommates laughed, but it was a very shocked sort. I think we use that kind of reaction to vent when the horrible just feels like too much; when there's no other way we can find relief in the moment. But helps in some weird way, so keep it up.
And, I'll buy you a beer if ever we happen to meet.
4426068 Thanks. For what it's worth, I identified the guy. Now, we have to wait and see whether the police and the coroner's office can track down his family. I'll probably never know if they do, but I'll continue to hope they succeed.