15. No possible way

Am both paramedic and mortician, so I’ve seen some real doozies. One of the most bizarre was the fellow who, upon autopsy, had his cause of death declared as electrocution, despite the fact that the abandoned farmhouse he was in hadn’t had electricity in decades. Lividity and decompose both supported the conclusion that he died where he was found, so it wasn’t a body dump, but there was no possible way for him to have been electrocuted there.

16. Closet addict

I’m an apprentice funeral director, but we had an autopsy tech come into my school once to do an autopsy demonstration. He was asked this very question and this was his answer. Male, mid 50’s presented with jaundice and other signs of alcoholism but supposedly no history of drinking. During preliminary observation techs noted a red liquid coming from the an*l area. Assuming blood it was tested. Came back as red wine and blood. Turns out the deceased was [cut] a closet alc*holic who would give himself enemas with whatever alcohol he had, in this case red wine, the doctors concluded he pierced part of his colon/rectum with whatever he enema’d himself with and led to a bleed.

17. Ouch

I worked briefly as a morgue assistant a few years back. The job mainly consisted of moving corpses and holding organs while the pathologist did his thing. By far the most “WHAT!” worthy death I saw was a guy who had been working in a factory, getting himself off by rubbing his penis on the underside of the high speed conveyor belt he was meant to be operating. He got caught and it tore off most of his crotch. Ruled as death by misadventure, he had bled out (torn femoral artery) before the paramedics even made it to the scene.

18. “Come check this out”

Worked at a funeral home for a few years. First ever house call I took was to pick up a guy who died at home. Heard from his son that he hadn’t been to the doctors in 20 years. We take him to the medical examiner and discover he had a hernia on his scrotum causing it to be the size of a football. Not sure how he lived with that thing, but he was wearing jeans and a jockstrap to keep that thing in. His toenails looked like dragon toenails as he obviously couldn’t bend over to clip them. You know it’s messed up when the medical examiner calls another medical examiner on duty to say “hey dude, come check this out.”

19. Lesson Learned

I wasn’t a pathologist or medical examiner but a histology tech that assisted with autopsies periodically years ago. We did a routine autopsy on an elderly woman that died during a hospital stay. Prior to the autopsy we remove all the left over tubes and catheters. Once that’s done, the pathologist starts dissecting the organs out, doing a gross examination, weighing each one then saving pieces of tissue he’s interested in. During the dissection of the heart, he cut open one of the chambers and was tossing little pieces of tissue he wasn’t interest in into the trash. He then tossed a small piece of plastic that looked like the end of a catheter. I asked what it was and he replied that it was just that and that it was probably a piece he cut while removing the heart. I then reminded him that we’d removed all the catheters prior to the autopsy. He quietly reached into the trash, pulled the piece out and submitted it for further cross examination. As it turns out, someone must have sheared off the end of a 22 gauge catheter when giving the lady an IV and never reported it, maybe not realizing what they’d done. That piece traveled to the heart and lodged in a valve and caused her death.

Years before as a medic I always remembered when they taught us to put catheters in to never try to rethread the needle if we weren’t quite in the vein but to start from scratch with a new catheter. This was a bold reminder.

Now as a nurse, I still see nurses not wanting to bother restarting with a new catheter and I have to stop and tell them the story.

20. Perfectly balanced body

Back in med school, during internship at the coroner’s I saw a case when a man in his late 50s was found dead at home, although under quite peculiar circumstances. His body was found standing – yes, standing – in the bedroom, with one leg raised and resting on the bed, basically as if he wanted to climb on the bed but suddenly died. Further examination led to a severe heart attack as the most likely cause of death, however, no evidence of someone moving the body post-mortem could be found. The conclusion was that either someone would have to have found him quite early and basically hold the corpse for hours until it became stiff enough to stand on its own, or that his death was so sudden, that it happened just in the right moment so that his body would be perfectly balanced and not fall over.

21. Not what you thought it was

X-Ray tech did a chest x-Ray on a male in the ICU with severe pneumonia. He was barely able to get a breath. On an X-Ray his lungs were completely white. White means dense, hard material (like bone or metal) lungs are a mixture of black (air) and grey ( tissue/mucus). The X-Ray tech is puzzled by the compete whiteness wondering what kind of material it is or what happened to his lungs so he called the doc for a medical history. The doc replied thusly:

“Patient was on a bender, looking for drugs. He broke into his neighbors garage and found a batch of powder in his neighbors fishing tackle box and snorted the whole thing. A few days later he developed pneumonia. It turns out that the fisherman neighbors sister had died years ago and the fisherman kept her ashes in his tacklebox so she went with him whenever he went fishing, just like when she was alive. The patient had snorted the leftover metallic ash of his neighbors dead sister.

He died a week later.”