Death and Life and everything besides

Here we are again, at the beginning of another entry.Enjoy.

It's the start of June, and i have one more month of Practical Training at Melaka General Hospital. Last month on the 18th of May a few fellow trainees dragged( well, actually i asked to be dragged) me to a witness a post mortem conducted at the forensic pathology dept. a.k.a. the morgue.
It all began nicely enough, when one of my friends called the morgue in the morning and they said there was a body coming in.So we trooped down to the basement level and walked in.... walked ... walked.... walked....into the bilik pemeriksaan bukan muslim.. and there lying on the steel table was a chinese man. They were sewing him up. What a disapointment.Apparently we were late and the post mort was already done.Anyway, we stayed a while to watch the sewing-up. The male attendant told us the chinese guy was in his 50s and died the evening before after a game of badminton,when he collapsed and died on the spot.Cause of death:Heart attack. What hit me was that the pathologist and attendants don't arrange inner organ back into the body before sewing up. They just stuff everything in...and..they sew up bodies with ..of all things..kite strings.That's what the attendant said, asked him myself:
Me:Uncle, ini jahit punya benang buat dari apa?
Attendant: tu....main layang-layang punya(elaborate up & down hand gestures)ini sendiri beli punya.
Meaning that the strings weren't ordered from some uppity medical supplies company,but bought from your usual neighbourhood kedai runcit.

Anyway, my friends made the morgue people promise to call us once another body arrives. Which happened quite soon.After lunch.
So, we trooped down once again.This time it was a chinese girl. Died after an accident that happened the morning itself.Only after the post mort was done however, did I learn, from various sources that she was 16, that she was on her motorbike going to school when she met with an accident, and died of concussions to the head and other organs from being flung off her bike and hitting the road. Top student.Only sixteen.The day after she died, her entire school took off so that they could go to her funeral.Only sixteen.
this time, i got to see a full post mort.They started by removing her brain, first cutting her scalp from ear to ear,tearing it open to the top and bottom, then drilling through the skull, finally, reaching the brain, snipping off some connective tissue.The brain was weighed, and then the doctor proceeded to slice the brain, to look for clots, which was very much like slicing banana cake. Every half inch, slice, half inch, slice.The brain is placed back into the body by wrapping the mass up in muslin cloth(or cheese cloth, couldn't really tell) and placing it back into the skull compartment, putting back the drilled-off skull top, closing the scalp and sewing it back.Simultaneously,the chest was sliced open with a scalpel, the top ribs were cut off and removed like how one removes a breast-plate of armour, and the doctor literally put her hand in and rummaged for the desired organ...lung, heart,spleen,etc.After that ,it ended with the usual sewing.
Did i mention that the one and only Physician at Patologi forensik is a lady?A quite petite malay lady.She needed an extra wooden platform(about15-20cm high) to be tall enough to bend over the corpse on the steel table.Heart of a lion ,that one.
H'okay.Whew. That's it then. A few afterthoughts:
I don't remember getting quesy and didn't lose my apetite.(thank God)Didn't feel nausea,didn't fell squemish.But I did feel shaky all over until evening.I do remember thinking about the families of both these people.the one thought inside me was the grief, the pain, the sudden emptiness, the void, the hole that these 2 people left on their friends,families. They were real people with friends, loved ones, dreams, aspiration, secrets, sadness, just like me, just like all of us,just like you.
especially the girl.I'm sure the night before as she was packing for school, it never crossed her mind- This might be my last day alive...... or...... tomorrow I die.But it was her last night. I don't think i might ever grasp what her parents are going through.i use the word"are" because the death of a child is the deepest grief on earth, deeper that any other grief and worse than any other pain.Try speaking to people who have lost children. It's the hardest pain to heal, the hardest to let go.I have spoken to one. My Mum.
Ironically, just a few floors above the Forensic Dept. is the Gynaecology & Obstetrics ward, where all the babies are.

Note: Some background info on both victims were obtained from conversations with people who knew people who knew these people.Not all info obtained from conversations with Hospital personnell.Melaka is a small place.