Well, yes, but remember those who sign up and the goat…
Oh, you have to sign up, just to explain this!!
Can you people suck up, or what? :rolleyes:
If the password thing doesn’t work, just sign up with a capital G (and ask the mods to change it if the lower case g makes you feel snuggly).
How do you deal with the smell? What is that stuff people put on their upper lip? I saw a show in London about forensics and one of them said strawberry ice cream helped…which made me go :dubious:
What poisonings have you dealt with? I forget where I read it, but a forensic scientist (what do you call yourself colloquially?) said that in all her years doing the job she had never encountered a poisoner that confessed to it. Something about the psychology of that form of killing someone was hand-in-hand with lying about it.
Any unique cases?
Tell us your vote(s) for Darwin Award from cases you’ve been part of, please.
You mention your sense of humor a few times…does these lead into any pranks?
Thanks!
-Tcat
You have got to stay. Your flooding me with my memories of good old college days.
I studied with Bill Bass in Knoxville 
Saw him while he was in town last week!
I am kind of wondering what I would be doing now has I not changed directions in my life.
If your registering and the powers that be allow it, I can and would gladly couch up the pocket change to keep you here on the boards. For a small token of your appreciation. Maybe a Mpsims thread “Osip is good, Osip is great, Yeah Osip!”
will check back later, I have to go give a demo and class at the local high school on how to stab people with style! (Digrassi and Silver to be exact, for those in the know)
Osip
Ps you can also contact me via e-mail is in my board profile.
Skid…SMACK…Ouch!!
OtakuLoki! Your butter gun is leaking butter all over the floor! I just slipped in it! Can’t you be more careful? You can kill someone with that thing!!
and gabriela can autopsy them… 
gabriela–
Hey, good to see the “Member” designation under your name!
Now I have a question. How cold are those bodies in the cooler?
Wow, somebody bumped my thread!
I thought it was long gone.
Whoa, pontification opportunity. Reverse chron order to thank Hil for bumping me and welcoming me.
Hilarity darling, they are the same temperature as meat in your refrigerator. Forty degrees F or so. We don’t actually freeze them. Ever tried to put a knife into frozen meat?
Also, a funny thing about really freezing bodes: they don’t decompose while they’re frozen, but once they start warming up, they go really fast. Like, sometimes, while you’re still autopsying them.
I once had to autopsy a lady whose son shot her and put her in the freezer - I mention this only because the case has been adjudicated. We started the autopsy while she was still partially frozen. it wasn’t fun. But at least we beat the onset of decomposition.
Even a person who’s been in the cooler for 36 hours (say got shot late Saturday night and we don’t start the autopsy until Monday morning) can be so cool to the touch that I have to keep running my gloved hands under warm water during the autopsy. So I’m really glad 40 F is our lower limit.
If you studied with Bill Bass, I bet the memories that flooded you were olfactory.
You mean I have to start swelling other people’s heads?
Ooh! Ooh! Tell us how to stab people with style. (I only know about how they’ve been stabbed. No expertise on how to do it!) I recall one autopsy my colleague did which I read over for her - twenty-six stab wounds and only one of them fatal. We said we thought the guy oughta have been sent to stab wound training first. And here you add style.
The wintergreen they put on their upper lip is worse than useless. It opens the nasal passages wider. It’s more of a placebo the cops use to help themselves stand the idea of it.
There is only one thing you can do with the smell. Get a clipboard and a diagram, and go stand as close to the body as you can make yourself without upchucking. Work on diagramming the body so you have something to think about other than the smell for two and a half minutes. Your nose will gradually stop perceiving the smell as strongly. When you can, sidle closer. You never stop smelling it entirely, but your nose goes dead and you can handle it. Do not move away from the body for the entire time you’re working with it. If you need something, have someone else get it for you. If you move away into fresher air, your nose re-sensitizes and you have to start all over again.
The rookie cops will run in and out of the room “to get a breath of fresh air” and it hits them so hard when they come back. Meanwhile some fifty-year-old female forensic tech is sitting with the body at its head, and they think she is so macho. She is, but what it is, she knows about keeping her nose dead.
Forgot to say: snuggly - aww. Snuggling the forensic pathologist, aww cuddly!
Strawberry ice cream - hunh? Hunh? What? Hunh?
I think that was my boss, the great Marcella Fierro, and the head of the Department of Forensic Sciences, being interviewed together; we had the article up on our bulletin board for awile. Where was that article published? Nat Geographic? Something.
I see almost no poisonings (assuming you don’t count self-administered overdoses of Oxycontin and cocaine). Most people nowadays who want to kill someone use quick violent methods like guns and knives. Even blunt trauma bludgeonings are comparatively rare. Don’t believe I’ve ever had a homicidal poisoning. Does insulin count?
This’ll be a future thread.
Hundreds of them. We call them “stupicides”. How about this one: steal your grandfather’s car and drive it off at a high rate of speed… though the Club ™ is across the steering wheel.
You mention your sense of humor a few times…does these lead into any pranks?
[/QUOTE]
The cops tend to get into pranks more than the docs do. Cops will do things like lying down inside a clean body bag waiting for the rookies to come in the room. But the absolutely meanest are the forensic techs. Who don’t do body-related pranks: we’re all pretty immune to thrills n chills. Who do things like waiting until one of the docs is selling her car, then buying a container of antifreeze, going out into the parking lot, and pouring a puddle of it underneath the chassis.
I feel the draft from here!
Hey, they sucked me onto the boards!
Ivylass, whose name I love, I am so sorry, but this is still public. Just because ain’t no one here but us chickens doesn’t mean people aren’t looking over the shoulders of the chickens.
If chickens have shoulders.
Gabriela’s Man offered me one guide when he watched me sign up: “Don’t put anything here you wouldn’t want to see quoted against you in a homicide trial.”
If I ever see you in person, be glad to regale you with stories.
Too late. My goat’s been gotten endless times.
(evil henchman grin)
Beautiful name. Clairobscur. Chiaroscuro.
Interested in becoming a forensic what? Pathologist? Technician? Scientist? Anthropologist? Very different career paths.
They do it because it makes a grand story. NEVER happens in real life. NEVER.
Do you know it is not a crime to lie to a forensic pathologist, but it is a felony to lie to a police officer in the course of an investigation?
That’s why, when people call us up all grumbly and say, “We think our aged grandpa’s death from cancer was brought on by his girlfriend and she killed him,” we say, “Ma’am, sir, if you really think so, you need to go to the police.” If they’re willing to say it to a police officer, we’re willing to do the autopsy that will show that his was a totally natural death from cancer. If they’re not, we’re not.
Silliest one of those I ever dealt with was a sincere man in his mid-thirties who was quite sure his aged grandma who died in bed had been killed by his brother. He had a whole array of nonsensical reasons (she always put her prayer cap on before praying, but when she was found dead in bed, her Bible was open but her prayer cap wasn’t on! Wow! Major clue there! Call Law and Order!). His real reason, however, and it always comes down to money, was that he suspected his brother of stealing her Social Security checks.
I pointed out that in that case, his brother was the last person who would want her dead. Supply dries up.
He got agitated, and confided to me, “My brother has studied strange martial arts, and I suspect that he killed her in one of those ways that leaves no mark.”
I said, “Sir, if it leaves no mark, then there will be no mark.” Exactly what do you expect me to find at autopsy, you doofus? A mark of leaving no mark? Exotic Chinese characters inscribed inside her nose?
I did the autopsy. She died of heart disease. I couldn’t help wishing I could add … “and some strange force that left no mark”.
gabriela
I just have to say I laughed on and off for two hours at the grapefruit on a toothpick.
It has not in the slightest decreased my respect for Twickster.
I am late to this johnny pile, but I wanted to say Welcome ! to gabriela and I am very happy you joined up!
Now, onto serious questions:
Is there a standard personality that seems to be attracted to your field of employment ? Do you have conventions? What are those like?
Also, while I think gabriela is a perfectly lovely user name, I think you could have picked I See Dead People.. harumphf
Oh my God. Oh my God. Shirley Ujest wrote to me. To me. Personally.
(gapes flabbergastedly for two or three minutes)
And welcomed me!!!
Shirley, you - uh. (Turns around three times. Gazes at wall)
Maybe I better just answer the question.
No standard personality. We tend to be a bit on the outrageous side for docs. But we have to pass through the pathologist filter first, which selects for quiet, academic, obsessive-compulsive people. So we’re all a little weird.
I was once offered a chance to buy in on some hats the forensic dept of a local police agency was buying. Baseball caps that said “I See Dead People”. I thought it over and said, you know, I’d rather have one that says “I See Live People”.
Hi gabriela - welcome!
Hope you don’t mind answering a few of my questions… Feel free not too, as I appear to have got a bit carried away…
Since you’ve become a forensic pathologist, has it changed any of your personal habits? Do you drive more slowly? Eat healthier?
Forensic anthropologist V Forensic pathologist - can you be both? What are the differences in how they work/who they work for? 'Cause I’ve been watching ‘Bones’ (h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s) and want one of those 3d imagey thingys. As I’m sure you would!
In movies/tv its an oft-repeated theme, how people are declared dead and go to the morgue only to not be dead and wake up. HUH? I find this really hard to believe - but does it happen in real life? How? Why?
Dealing with death everyday - what effect has this had on your beliefs/spirituality? Are you a parent? Does this affect your point of view?
Stories/Anecdotes/Personal experiences please - you must have some beauties!
Tell me about your first autopsy and if/how it was different than your expectations.
My brother has just become a Policeman (in Scotland) Any advice I can pass on to him?
(Already passed on the dead nose tip - thanks!)