Autopsy of a Tragedy

I’ve now seen something I never wanted to see. I’ve seen a mother’s worst nightmare. Yesterday a teenage girl was found in a trashcan. She had been stabbed to death. Today I watched her autopsy.

I showed up late for the 8:30 am case review at the medical examiners office with other medical students. We were shown a slideshow of pictures that started with her body being found with her high-tops sticking out of the top of a trashcan, her body collapsed at the bottom. As we stood to go to the examiner’s room I was terrified.

I followed everyone and struggled to get myself under control. I thought about the girl; the now victim. As the autopsy started, all I could do was keep bending my knees, one at a time, to make sure I didn’t faint. First came the superficial exam—every inch was examined with clothing and then without.

She was so beautifully human and she died a terrible death. The medical examiner employees seemed unable to concentrate on the circumstances. Everyone was texting and laughing when they weren’t working. In answer to my confused look someone said, “If we don’t laugh we’re gonna cry.”

Once all her clothes were removed the doctor started having to document every stab wound by location, size, and depth and all of a sudden I transitioned to thinking like a medical student. I stopped thinking about her and started thinking about her body. I started looking at her stab wounds and thinking about what organs the wounds would have hit and looking at the chest x-ray to try to understand the injuries. Whenever thinking about the position she would have been in got too emotional, I retreated back to wondering if the knife pierced her kidneys.

As I drove home the shock of it had worn off, but I was still deeply jarred and I wanted to call someone, but the details are too gruesome. I’m still hesitant to describe her death fully even though every detail is vivid in my mind. I thought about the detective I had befriended and wondered how he managed. Did his wife ask about his day? Could she bear to hear about it? How does he cope without someone to talk to?

In the process of becoming a doctor, there are bridges you cross that separate you from the rest of your friends and family; things you’ve experienced that they haven’t. Last year when I went home for Christmas from medical school my family was very curious about anatomy lab—everyone knew that as a first year medical student I had crossed that bridge of having dissected a human. And yet I wasn’t warned about this bridge. I have now seen and inspected the body of a girl who was brutally murdered. Just remembering the holes in her jacket from the many stabbings overwhelms me. And yet it’s too huge to dump on a friend because would only be worth it if I could describe every detail to make them grasp the gravity of the experience and yet I can’t do that to them. Although I might try because I don’t know how to deal with this alone.

I’m 27 and when I was a teenager I put myself in harms way and yet tonight I get to sit at home with my peppermint tea, my chocolate lab, and my dichotomous feelings. I feel blessed to be alive, I feel blessed that none of my friends have ever had to die that kind of death, and I also feel isolated and changed for knowing that someone did that to someone’s daughter. This morning changed so many things for me: CSI doesn’t sound interesting, rather horrific; self defense classes sound like a wonderful idea because having to go to therapy as a rape victim was no longer my worst-case-scenario; and retaliation killings make more sense to me than I ever wanted them to. With so much running around in my head, I still don’t know what to say when my grandma calls and asks how my day was. Medicine puts you in contact with people at their most vulnerable, emotional moments, and yet, tonight none of my friends can make my emotional day go away because I saw what one person can do to another and that will stay with me.