First off, let me be perfectly clear that I am NOT so incredibly obsessed with your posts. The way I see it, I’m only your third or fourth biggest fan. (Down, five and six! Back! Back!) I hope I’m not creeping you out here.
Ok. So.
You’ve mentioned earlier on that you enjoy writing, as a hobby. Check.
You’ve also given quite a few excellent samples of your writing, which tends to be funny, obscure, smart, and curious. Check.
You’ve also mentioned, once or twice, with examples, that you have a wicked cool job. One which requires plenty of smarts, the schooling of which would flunk out maybe 99% of the SDMB readership. Check.
It’s pretty obvious that you have to write and publish, for the good of mankind. Memoirs, or a tell-all about forensic pathology, or something. For the good of mankind (oh and my bookshelf too.)
So… have you seriously considered it? In the process? Ruled it out? (Has it hit the NY Times best-sellers list and I missed it?)
If, by way of answering this post, you skip the question completely and divulge another story about being a forensic pathologist, I won’t complain one bit.
The limitation is anonymity. I still never discuss any case here until it’s been adjudicated - talk about triple cautions - but the only reason I am safe to talk as myself is nobody knows who I am.
If I wrote a book with my name on it, I’d have to resign myself to unemployability for the rest of my life. I’m only 48. There are lots of corpses standing between me and retirement.
Lying, really.
Are you nuts? 50%, maybe 25%. Being a doctor doesn’t require much smarts. Average MD’s IQ, I read once, is in the 120 range; average researcher, 150. (We ain’t smart, but they ain’t rich. Annoys the hell out of them.) Still - It ain’t rocket science! I happen to be nerdier than the average forensic bear, but who in this pleasant company all on its way to Canterbury, is not?
And I would sit awed and speechless before a compendium of Quadgop the Mercotan’s stories. He probably suffers from the same anonymity problem. Hey, if we had a PROFESSIONAL EDITOR among us, maybe she could put together a compendium of the best wicked stories from all her favorite contributors to the Dope? She could call it… oh, I dunno… “I Could Tell You, But I’d Have To Kill You.”
So this old guy who’s getting a little Alzheimery decides one day he can’t take it any more and he has to kill his wife. Why? As he confessed later to the cops, “She keeps watching that sex channel on TV all the time, and I just couldn’t take her one more time passed out drunk on the livingroom floor!”
(The sex channel proved to be the soap operas, by the way. And their ages are 66 and 69.)
So he bludgeons her over the head with a blunt instrument and she crashes to the ground, unresponsive. He figures he’s good and killed her, so now it’s time to dispose of the body. He takes a chain saw and cuts her up - but unfortunately, at the autopsy, unequivocal signs in the neck wound showed us that she was alive at the start of it; without his conscious knowledge, he actually killed his wife by sawing her head off. (She was at least out cold for the event.)
He then takes the head and neck and places them with one of the arms in a large clear plastic sweater box she had bought last winter from Target. He puts the remaining body parts in large black plastic bags, drives them to the dump, stands on the little precipice, and flings them in. He goes home conscious of a job well done.
Her daughter phones on a Friday. He says, and mind you he is getting a little Alzheimery and he knows this will fly, I took your mom into xxx town this afternoon to do some shopping, dropped her off, and now I don’t know where I left her. Daughter gets off the phone worried but unconvinced. Saturday, she phones again, still no mom to talk to. She calls cops, who go by and stand in doorway and talk to old fellow, who seems sane rational and calm if a bit forgetful; they depart.
She re-phones cops on Sunday and different cops go out. Now this old man had what we refer to as a “Collins Bros” house - one in which the pack rat owners have been saving everything of no value for years - one in which paths are worn between the piles of newspapers and magazines stacked to the ceiling. (May have been why the Saturday cops did not want to enter and try to look around.) Sunday cops go in, and they see blood in the livingroom near the floor. They ask old man’s permission to search the house. He freely grants it. In the course of the search they go into the garage, and there is the garish spectacle of a clear plastic Target box with a slowly rotting human arm and head in it covered with decomposing blood.
The old man comes to see, looks at it, shakes his head, and says, "I could have sworn I remembered to take that to the dump too!
Great crane-obtaining inversions of the dump eventually unearth all her body parts.
Our response at the morgue?
This simply illustrates the old proverb…
wait for it…
“You’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached!”
Happy Halloween,
Gabriela and the crew at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
Wow. I don’t know which is more horrifying - the crime or the punchline!
In all fairness, I suppose that I did ask for it…
I kinda like the concept of the Anonymous Coroner or the Anonymous MD. Kinda like the Anonymous Shopper concept, except lives might be on the line. Hmmm… I smell sit-com!
I suppose pen names are probably not very impenetrable in the context of the limited number of medical examiners in the US. Figuring out who you were might not be too difficult for your peers, based on the stories you had to tell.
If Dr. G can have a tv show, why can’t gabriela have a book!
I’ll never feel quite the same about storage bins from Target, now.
The problem with gabs and I telling stories is that we have to wait a decent interval of time before we can write them up and disseminate them with a clear conscience. And in my case at least, so much strange stuff has happened in the interim that I no longer remember the earlier strangeness.
Perhaps a year from now or so, some doper should remind me to write about the hungry forgetful orthotic killer. Also anti-nutrient man (now with hydrophobia). And the practitioner of I-Sue-U who enjoyed going out for exotic medical tests.
Hmm … it seems to me there’s a simple solution to that, QtM. You and gabriela write down all the great story material as it happens, and lock it away somewhere safe. Like, in a safe, if need be. Then, when the requisite time has passed and/or cases closed, pull it all out and voila! Happy Dopers!
I guess since you’re an anonymous prison doc and she’s an anonymous coroner, it wouldn’t work to pull a Strangers on a Train story switch. What with the outcomes and all.
twickster, take note. One year from now, as we approach Hallowe’en of 2007, kindly haul out this post and remind him, willya? (I would, but I’m not organized enough)
QtM, you are absolutely right. The stories that impress me the most are the CURRENT ones… and those are the ones I can’t tell. Once they are safely two to four years behind me, I’ve forgotten how outraged, impressed, or amused I was by the nitty-gritty details. And we keep all our files on paper. And my files aren’t kept separately from the other medical examiners’ files. Jogging the memory wouldn’t be worth it.
On the other hand, could you remind me next year about the lady who died of caffeine overdose, the girl whose surgery killed her 22 years later, and the guy who managed to call 911 before being shot through the tongue.
On reflection, there are some stories that could be completely adjudicated and open for discussion and they still wouldn’t belong on the Dope. I am thinking about the worst case of child abuse I ever autopsied. Someone started an MPSIMS thread the other week about really good scares on the way to Hallowe’en. I immediately started thinking about what this child must have felt as that brute sent him to his death and I knew no matter what urges I might have to confess and relieve that that story and I didn’t belong in the thread. Real scares does not equal Hallowe’een fun.
I am sure Qadgop also has a few stories he will never tell.
I actually dreamed of this thread last night. It was freaky. I swear I’m not obsessed.
In my dream, I stood in line at Border’s to buy the book. The title went something like:
“It Really Cuts Out Your Heart: Outrage, Humor and Other Slices of Life From the Coroner’s Office” edited by Gabriela von Skalenundskalpell, the Anonymous Forensic Pathologist.
It retailed for $39.95, though the abbreviated edition (only the title was shortened) cost $29.95.
The book started out with an introduction to the trade, starting with the history and ethics of the craft, explaining how post-mortem examinations advance justice and science; then it detailed odd and fascinating aspects of the education, legal investigations, daily work and social life of the average medical examiner; then delved into many specific cases from across the country and around the world, with many humorous asides explaining various bodily functions in plain language.
It was a book that 7th graders and PhDs alike could happily delve into. It was a best seller, and brought the world together in peace and harmony by making everyone laugh while grossing them out.
Well it isn’t written by our lovely Gabriela, but I heard an interview with the author of Final Exits today on the radio.
Sounded interesting, not as good as QTP and Gabby’s stories, but interesting.
