Hey, Gabriela, sweetie, when you get back from your slab, you will come and answer our questions, won’t you? Can hardly concentrate with the not knowing. Don’t be a tease.
Hey, Gabriela, sweetie, when you get back from your slab, you will come and answer our questions, won’t you? Can hardly concentrate with the not knowing. Don’t be a tease.
roger thornhill, if you have suspicions about someone trolling or being a sock, bring it to the attention of the mods. Do not make it a personal crusade to “out” anyone. Please do not do this again.
I got a bit suspicious, I admit, when she called me “baby”. No forensic pathologist has ever called me that before. Glad you’re on the case now, anyhow.
I have a question.
On TV, which I fully understand is sometimes different from real life, forensic pathologists are often portrayed as being somewhat blasé about handling their subjects’ body fluids; for example, they might be drinking a cup of tea while they are soaked in gore to the elbows, of they might be eating a sandwich while observing a skull being cut open with a rotary blade.
Does this sort of attitude exist at all in real life? Actually, please just tell me it doesn’t.
You mention that your husband isn’t a doctor, Gabriela. Does he enjoy your pathological stories?
Did you learn nothing when you were told to quit with your baiting? All you’ve done is earn yourself another warning. You’re done in this thread, roger, so don’t return to it again. Should you want to voice your objections, take it to e-mail or the Pit.
Warning noted, Skippy. I mistakenly thought someone who cuts up dead bodies for a living could take a bit of gentle ribbing. Nothing to take to the Pit, so I’ll sign out of this thread as requested now.
I am truly sorry. I can only post from home, and usually only in the mornings, so I completely missed these last several posts. I thought this thread had gone to the Great Home in the Sky.
Dear Skipmagic, I wouldn’t even have noticed that there was ribbing going on. I’d have had no problem answering Roger Thornhill in the affirmative although I cannot provide absolute details.
I am a board certified forensic pathologist employed fulltime in forensic practice by a state agency; however, I am cautious about allowing personal identifying information out, since I have a sense of humor and government agencies, notoriously, do not. I have been quite careful not to say anything against the rules or regulations of my job, but you never know when somebody will take offense against the demonstration of a sense of humor in a person who deals with the dead. I would not like to find my job in danger because of a post to the Dope. Hence, I need to remain reasonably anonymous.
Skipmagic, may I offer this question to Roger Thornhill? Roger, is there some way I can prove to you through extensive knowledge of autopsy or forensics that I am what I have said I am, without personal identifying information? Would the recent post called “There have been no squcky autopsy threads lately” be considered valid, or is it too light hearted?
I am definitely not a sock puppet.
And, despite an MD, four board certifications, the advanced age of 48, and nearly 3000 autopsies, I do still sometimes call people “baby”.
And I still don’t know what a “Number Six” is!
Actually my husband and I were brought together by one of my most embarrassing stories… and the fact that a couple listening at the next table asked for a bottle of Brut…
After sixteen years with me my husband is squcked out by virtually no discussion topic. However, that doesn’t extend to a sight of the real thing. He avoids visuals as carefully as he can!
And the young medical students are beginning to be uncertain whether he’s a doctor. He throws around terms like “pulmonary embolism” so competently. He knows the real abbreviations like PE, and the in-joke abbreviations like STD.
I hope I have not brought down the wrath of SkipMagic by answering this innocuous sounding question. But I assume RogerThornhill has left the thread not to return.
I’m truly sorry to a great poster whose posts I read with avidity, but it does exist. Really, though, it would be truer to say that for decades it DID exist.
There is a great divide between the grand old pathologists (almost all of whom were men) and the present day pathologists (half of whom are women). Not that it’s sex relevant.
The difference is AIDS. Once the great plague was recognized about 1982-3, all the casual machismo and joking stuff went away. Universal precautions became the rule and this kind of behavior vanished from the autopsy suite.
Everyone knows stories about the pathologist in the 1960’s who would eat a ham sandwich over the body. But no one eats in the autopsy suite today. We suit up like surgeons to do our work. I am one of the last people who prefers not to wear cutproof gloves (you have to wear three layers to wear cutproofs: rubber gloves, the resistant cloth cutproof gloves, rubber gloves over that) since I am more dexterous and agile without them, and I tend to cut myself only if I am momentarily clumsy. (They aren’t really cutproof anyhow – more cut resistant.) But our medical students not only have to suit up like surgeons, but wear the three layers of gloves even if they are only standing over the body looking down and in.
That said, I have become very casual about body fluids. One always gets some blood on one somewhere (the wrist between the glove and the sleeve is very common). I have decided that blood (theirs) on intact skin (mine) isn’t going to kill me. Hasn’t yet. I have also dealt with ovarian cyst fluid, bile, urine, gastric contents, intestinal contents, decomposition fluid… one does get blase over time. I can basically clean up anything so long as I have rubber gloves to wear.
Oh, yes, and one of the perks of the job is the adoration of strange dogs who sniff one’s wrists.
The admiration is a little bit different from one side of the puddle to the other. Bernard Knight and Sidney Smith were among the greats in the UK. Milton Helpern, the older Dr. DiMaio, these spring to mind on this side.
The middle generation (if I can say so - the great pathologists who followed the founders of the field) is now senior. Many of them are deeply admired but others, well, others, well, this is a public forum not for airing of private laundry. Shall we just say that when Cyril Wecht got booted, many of us heaved a thankful sigh.
The other great divide is between people who would prefer not to think about death unless it is all gussied up as Death, in Literature; and those of us who really get into the squcky details.
In fact many of those people would prefer not to think about us at all, because then they have to imagine our sex lives, and it gets… well…
You know where I stand on the squcky details, and now I know where you stand, too. Since you were nine, eh?
Since I was five, and got to watch while our neighbour’s pigs were disassembled by a couple of slaughtermen.
Mister, Mister,what’s THAT bit do? 