Sorry, sorry, sorry. I had an urgent need for gingersnaps.
Okay, the appendix. Did someone else get it? Here, hand me the knife… er, scalpel.
Oops. Sorry.
WhyNot, you have insurance, right? Sorry about that. It’ll grow back.
Hey, I found the appendix!
You know, for my last Bio class in high school our teacher didn’t have anything for us to do, so he pulled out a bucketful of rats. It was fun.
I guess we can’t play with the organs while she’s gone.
While she’s gone, let’s put some things back, only where they DON’T belong.
“We can re-build her, better than the original. We have the egg salad…”
That spleen thingy looks like it’d make a dandy heart, know what I mean?
wanders back around the table, munching egg salad.
Hey - OW! - What’s up?
(sorry, IRL my friend Dawn came over and I had to go pack my kitchen for the move. Since she was here to help and all, it seemed rude to keep having fun here.)
OOOOO! BRAIIIIIIIINS…
poke, poke
Oh, sorry. I’ve been busy rereading West Wing recaps over at TWoP.
You want me to make the Y incision? With the big heavy shears? That will make the ribcage pop open like a couple of barrels that have been tied together with string?
Wow…everything is getting blurry…why is the room spinning?
Go lie down.
No, not in the metal drawer!
gabriela, when you get back, I do hope you’ll share with us the reason you happen to know this particular tidbit.
I have visions of one of two things having happened in your experience: either someone fainted during a first look at the job; or a ‘body’ proved to be a little less deceased than people sending it to you had assumed.
I wanna know which it was. And I’m hoping for the zombie answer, to be honest. 
Who isn’t??
Well, I imagine indecisive1 has other things on her mind - like watching those people trying to replace her brain with a sculpture made of egg salad.
Hey, let’s put her pancreas inside her skull and see if **gabriela **notices when she gets back…
…hey, where’s her pancreas? I can’t find it in the pile of guts.
chewing happily, suddenly gets guilty look on face and puts hand in front of mouth
Huff! Sorry I’m late, I thought this was tomorrow!
I think I know… The hyoid bone “floats,” it isn’t attached to any other bones, so the other end of the muscle…[sub] turns back on its self?[/sub]
I remember the sternocleidomastoid from nursing school, it rotates the head.
I’ll just catch up by listening to the tape while she’s gone. You didn’t know you were being taped? This might get even more interesting!
I know why the 911 operator hangs up. I once didn’t get a room ready for an ER admit on Hallow’een night, because when they called up report, they said she had been pronounced at the scene, taken to the morgue, where she was left in an autopsy suite on a gurney.
A housekeeper went in an hour later to empty trash and heard her moaning. He called 911 three times before they would listen. I’m sure, that was after he peed his pants! (only guessing, there)
Anyway, I thought it was a joke. It wasn’t. She wasn’t dead when the medics pronounced her, she was just cold.
Oh, here on the tape, Did anyone notice if she when into the right or left subclavian? The left lung is a bit higher in the chest than the right, so puncturing a lung is more likely if the left subclavian is canulated.
Maybe ** indecisive1** fainted from blood loss after decanulation…
WhyNot, it looks kinda like a sponge… YaWanna, are you chewing something sweet? That might be what WhyNot is looking for.
BTW, is there any adult supervision in here?
Sig line!
Sig line!
No adult supervision at all!
Y’all better straighten up and put down the organs you’re mishandling, because the HEAD NURSE is here!!!
Now go tidy up. Put that half-chewed pancreas back in the gut pile. Sheesh, I didn’t even disconnect that thing from the duodenum yet.
Can’t take you guys anywhere.
Picunurse, keep your eye on them while I go read back through the replies, will you?
You all better look very penitent when I get back…
Hey, it takes longer when you’re training newbies. Could do it yourself in half the time. But then someday they’ll be useful, and you won’t be sorry you put in the effort to train them.
Just ask Winston Smith.
Or Picunurse.
Hal will get his turn… if not in this thread, well, then in about fifty years…
I am SO sorry it was not the zombie answer. But this is the real world, right? Hey, zombies are deathly afraid of forensic pathologists. Take all those organs out and scramble them? Remove hard-won brains? They have nightmares about us standing there with the evil mask face and the scalpel raised on high and the…
Scuse me, I was answering a question. There was a group of medical students and one interning lawyer. The lawyer fainted and cracked his head on a mop bucket. There was a serious scalp injury. The forensic pathologist in charge freaked out because she couldn’t remember what you do for live people. She actually started yelling, “Somebody call a doctor!” She has never been allowed to live this down.
Two of the students freaked out with her. Three did intelligent things like press on the wound and sit with the victim. One phoned 911, who really did hang up on them, and then phoned them back, and got indignant enough that they actually did send an ambulance to the morgue.
The lawyer went to the ER, where he got six stitches.
It is one of the most cherished stories of our historic morgue. The forensic pathologist (who is twice as experienced as I am, by the way) will never ever ever live it down.
All wrong guesses on the omohyoid. Omo means fricking shoulder in Latin. It runs from the shoulder to the hyoid. Sheesh.
Some people can grimace and tighten their neck in such a way that they can make the omohyoid stand out. It’s fun to watch them do it.
The hyoid gets broken sometimes when stranglers grab the neck. This is why we forensic people are very interested in it.
Lissa, take a scalpel and clean the hyoid. Get all the muscle off it if you can. I have to see if it was ever broken and healed.
Not all stranglings are fatal you know.
I just wanted to say this is by far the best thread I have read on the Dope for weeks. gabriela, you are as to a god- and your scalpel-work is superb!
May I ask a question- when did you decide to cut up dead people rather than live people, and how far did you follow the same course as ordinary doctors before/after you made that decisiom?
Awww, nuts! Stupid job, actually expecting me to do work today, making me miss all the entrail-poking fun! :mad:
Well, I’ll be damned if’n I’m going to miss out on all this…
:gathers up spare scalpels and demonstrates juggling technique over indecisive1’s corpse:
Fifty? I like your optimism. 
Hey, let’s finish the autopsy. We’ve kept indecisive1 waiting for a long time naked on a cold gurney. It’s abou 65 degrees F in this room you know. (To keep people in astronaut suits comfortable while they work.)
First I gotta aspirate urine from the bladder. Who’s feeling talented? Not Ivylass, this definitely involves getting your hands in urk. WhyNot? Do you want to stick your fingers behind the pubic bone, here, and blunt dissect away the bladder from the areolar tissue that connects it to the bone? Areolar means like spider webs (areola also means the pinky brown area of the female nipple, but it just musta looked like a spider’s web to somebody poetic 400 years ago), so it’s sort of fun to break. Another pathologist’s secret: blunt dissection is fun. More rewarding than gardening.
You’ll be turning a potential space into a real space. Let me know when the bladder’s come away from the bone. It’ll still be connected down below, at the urethra. Palpate it. Does it feel like it contains any urine?
Oh, look - what’s that? It’s a cute little uterus! Has this thing ever been used, indecisive1? It looks way too small.
Let’s get the uterus and fallopian tubes and cervix and ovaries out and then we’ll see if WhyNot is having any success with the bladder. Meanwhile, I’d better take that brain out - Eww! Who’s been getting egg salad all over this brain!
All right, Mr. Bus Guy. You come over here and get a lecture. Sure you’re funny, and sure you’re nonchalant, and sure you’re the class clown, and sure you know where to buy a mean egg salad – Where was I?
Um.
Don’t put egg salad on the brain. It’s not like I can’t recognize a brain. Do you know every one of these gyri and sulci has been named?? Do you want me to make you memorize them? They’re all in Latin, you know.
Anyway once we get the brain out, I’ll let you hold it in your hands, and you’ll experience for yourself that its texture is much more disgusting than egg salad. Sort of like a “slap rat” only larger and much, much worse.
You wanna divide the pituitary stalk and cut the optic nerves? Come on, it’s fun. Bet you can do it with a spoon. Suck the egg salad off it first.