I once drew blood from a (very recently) deceased dude up here. The docs had a lot of fun riding me for my exceptional powers of observation. (I just thought he was out of it and didn’t speak english). The mangled ones are the ones that affect me. And made up corpses as per Butterflies.
How boring. I thought the title of the OP was “I sawed my first dead body today”. Oh well.
Wow, I never considered florist a profession in which you would routinely see dead bodies, although now that you mention it, it seems likely.
The only dead body I’ve ever seen was someone who had died on the sidewalk. There was a large crowd around him and the police had covered the body with a sheet. I don’t know what happened to him, I just kept moving on.
I guess I’m pretty sheltered, dead body-wise. My mother used to take my sister and I to funeral masses all the time as children because they were the only masses available during weekdays. We would walk past the coffin to take Communion, but the caskets were always closed.
I was 11 when I saw my first dead person. My dad went to bed to take a nap before dinner at 4:30pm and a little after 6pm, my mum told me to wake him up.
I was like “Can’t do it he’s dead.” Everyone was joking on how calm I was. I had never seen a dead person before, but believe me I took one look at him and I knew he was dead.
The creepiest feeling I had is when I worked the reception at a hospital overnight. They would bring in the ER cases past me, and I could see the absolute horror in people’s eyes. You know in the movies, people always die so calmly, but it wasn’t like that. These people knew they were going to die and they were terrified.
But I guess they get used to it. I used to have to overhear the EMT and hospital staff. They’d be like “You should see what we’re bringing in. They’d be insulting the soon to be corpses.” I’m surprised no one ever raised a stink. I guess no one knew the radio channels back then
WARNING: This post is about dead babies.
I’m a medical technologist. The histology rotation of my internship year took place at the Children’s Hospital. Which means that I was making and staining sections of children’s tonsils and biopsies and such, but I also worked on autopsy specimens. On a couple of occasions, I assisted at autopsies by weighing organs, that sort of thing. The first two I assisted with weren’t too bad - they were fetuses with pretty severe deformations, and for some reason it didn’t bother me too much, because they didn’t really look like babies.
The one that got me, the one I couldn’t handle?
It was the SIDS case, a few-month-old baby with nothing at all outwardly wrong with her. The part that had me excusing myself from the room to try and pull myself together? The pathologist gently and respectfully undressing the baby, who’d been dressed in a tiny pink dress. That was really, really difficult. I cried a lot that night, I couldn’t help it.
And that’s a big reason why I knew nursing wasn’t for me. I’d get too attached and emotional. Better to stay in the lab and play with blood.
I started work at a funeral home (currently going for my apprenticeship!) with absolutely no experience, and yeah, the first body I saw affected me much more than I thought it would, even though she was embalmed and dressed and looking as lovely as a dead person can.
It was enough that for about a week or two afterward I seriously thought that I had made a mistake and wasn’t suited to the funeral industry, but now I can’t imagine doing anything else.
What helped for me was forcing myself to do any possible work I could in transferring and prepping the bodies. It very quickly became routine and lost the whole fear-of-the-unknown thing that I think is what made it so bad in the first place.
Great Doper name / post combo.
The first dead body I ever saw was as a kid. I was 10, maybe? (I’ll need to ask my sister, who was with me.) We were with my parents at a public fishing lake we’d been to several times. There was an unusual amount of boat activity that day, and somehow we heard that there had been a drowning and the boats were searching for the body.
What I remember now seems horrific. I remember seeing a boat going by, with a body being dragged behind. The body was pulled up close enough to the back of the boat that the head and torso were out of the water. The drowned man was African-American, and what I remember was that the skin on the body looked gray, rather than dark brown.
As I write this, I’m thinking, “Is that really what I saw?” For the sake of human dignity, would not a corpse have been placed in the boat? OTH, this would have happened in the '60s in southern WV. A drowned black man being dragged behind a boat does not seem improbable.
Like that for me too. Caskets and funeral homes creep me out.
This is one of the reasons why I’m no longer working in L&D. I’ve seen a few dead babies, mostly stillbirths, and I cried every time. I’m in postpartum now (natural progression I suppose!), and I’m much happier.
Sometimes I see two or three bodies in a day and if business is good (which it isn’t right now, stupid economy), it’s rare not to see at least one a week. When I first got started I was terrified of the dead. Now I don’t even mind putting flowers on or in the casket. I still can’t quite bring myself to touch the dead person yet.
Hair stylists are also in the background of the funerary industry. My boss did her mother’s hair for her viewing, but a lot of people make arrangements to have their regular beautician wash and style them one last time. They want to look as good in death as they did in life. 
That’s not always possible, though. I get to hear a lot of gruesome stories about the things done to make people presentable.
I can remember seeing a dead body when I was four. It was my Aunt’s husband who had died after a long illness. I hadn’t understood what dead meant until then. My mother answered the few questions that I had. On was, “Do people stop breathing when they’re dead?” I realized that being dead was going to happen to me some day and I didn’t take to that idea at all.
Compare that to my granddaughter. When she was about two or three, she saw something in the road which had been killed. She asked her mom what was going on with this animal. Her mom said that it had died. My granddaughter begins chanting, “I want to die! I want to die!”
I’m surprised at how old some of you seem to be when you see your first dead body. Although it wasn’t until I became a cop that I saw one in the wild, I was 9 when I went to my grandfather’s funeral. No open casket wakes where you guys are?
Jumper? Horrific accident?
The only dead-person-on-sidewalk I’ve seen was a man who had frozen to death on a cold winter’s night in Chicago (presumably - it’s not like I autopsied him). It was back before the days of cellphones, so I went on to the El station and asked the attendant to call the authorities.
I’m similarly surprised. Maybe I just had an atypically big family unlike most people from my generation I met almost all of my grandparents and even some of my great-grandparents, the great-grandparents passed away mostly before I graduated high school and other family members in that age bracket–guess we’re a long lived bunch, all passed away in clumps. Usually every year from a very early age I went to 3-4 funerals until I graduated High School and every one had an open casket wake.
I couldn’t agree more. I have made sure my parents know that in the event of my death, there will be no creepy ass embalming. Just chuck me in a hole in the ground, I guess.
I’m a former EMT and current medical student, so I’ve seen lots of dead bodies.
The first dead body you see on the job is always memorable–I still remember the name of the first code I worked a decade ago. After that, you quickly become used to it.
Dead kids still bother me. I’ve worked about half a dozen pediatric codes, mostly SIDS deaths plus a drowning and a car accident, and they haven’t gotten any easier for me.
Um, actually I sawed my first dead body 3 days ago. I’m a med student doing a rotation with the medical examiner. In the past week I have seen the tragic (infant accidentally smothered while sleeping with mom), the mundane (old people who died in their sleep), and those who kind of deserved it (pimp of underage girls shot in retaliation for a previous shooting). They aren’t the first bodies I’ve seen. I’ve had patients die before. These bodies really don’t affect me emotionally because I wasn’t involved in trying to keep them alive.
Egads. I will NEVER forget my first ripe one. He was all over the walls and the ceiling.
This is where I learned the trick of dumping coffee grounds into a skillet and putting it on a high flame on the stove. And it’s why I hate the smell of fresh ground coffee to this day.
I am soon 25 and have yet to see a dead body.
I have been to the funerals of two grandparents both of which had closed caskets. Neither of them died in a way that would be too gruesome to show in an open casket, but rather normal deaths at advanced ages (one cancer, and the other some heart problem). I can’t say I know what the norm around here is, but I think that the caskets are normally closed here.
I don’t know how I will react if/when I will see my first dead body, but in any case I am not looking forward to it.
Some people just don’t go to funerals. (Selfish, IMHO.) My boyfriend has filmed several memorial services but never “attended” one himself. He just doesn’t go. “I don’t like funerals.” Like there are people who really enjoy them? I’m pretty sure he’s never seen a dead person.