After being stripped naked of all its clothes, the body lays lifeless on the cold metal table.
The medical examiner cuts a long incision straight down the middle, from groin to chest. She then connects two more cuts – from the middle of each shoulder – making a large incision in the torso that looks like a “Y”.
She next pulls the skin and yellow, fatty, adipose tissue to the side, readies the electric saw toward the breastplate and pushes down to begin cutting. The Plexiglas windows dull the sound of metal teeth to bone, but do not blur the sight of calcium dust as it floats through the air.
After ripping the serrated ribs open, she begins to take blood samples from the heart and the stomach with a needle the size of a pencil.
Finally, she removes every organ from the body cavity – in one piece, slaps them onto a rolling cart, and sends them off to a doctor for inspection.
It sounds like the opening sequence of an episode of CSI, but this was real life for a few dozen Seaholm Anatomy students late last month, when they visited the Oakland County Morgue on a class field trip.
“I take students on this trip each year because I think it is a worthwhile experience,” Seaholm anatomy teacher Holly Minoletti said. “The students get very excited to see in action what they have been learning about.”
While the students witnessed a brief 30 minute window of an autopsy, it can take weeks for a doctor to finally explain a victim’s death.
The first group of students, the 2nd hour Anatomy class, experienced three autopsies. While the second group, the 4th hour Anatomy class, had five (they only managed to watch three autopsies
One of the first was a 60-year-old white male who was found dead in his bed. The doctor quickly discovered that this man’s mysterious death was due to his pulmonary artery in his heart being completely closed.
Another lady was foaming from the mouth when found, with a heating pad on her chest. Foaming from the mouth is usually a sign of drug overdose which cannot be decided until her blood and urine is run through toxic-screen for drugs. This, along with small pill particles found in the stomach, led the doctor to believe this was a drug overdose but nobody will know until the screening.
The second group saw a man who died from being shot in the head twice. The man did not die until a year later.
They also witnessed the autopsy of a woman who had a heart attack in her car. She was found four days later frozen in the front seat of her car in a parking lot.
“It was interesting to see that all the work I have put into class can be used in a real life occupation,” senior Jordan Kristopik said.
While most of Minoletti’s students who attended the trip found the experience quite interesting, others were disturbed.
“A person can only see so much,” senior Alexa Ebling said. “And this just went over my limits.”
To keep people from overextending their limits, many precautions were taken before walking into the autopsy arena. It’s not uncommon for viewers to pass out, and sometimes hit their heads on objects in the room. So to prevent any accidents, the tour guide explained in detail that all attendees needed to remain seated if they started to feel weird or woozy.
“I have had students start to feel ill and begin to pass out,” Minoletti said. “One student didn’t eat breakfast before and so she had to sit down and came pretty close to passing out.”
Any unexplained deaths or homicides are taken to the Oakland County Morgue. As in life, there are no set hours for death, so employees here work around the clock, bringing in as many as seven bodies a day.
The constant death can be desensitizing.
“Everybody who worked there seemed like they had just died and come back to life an hour before I got there,” senior Megan Coe said. “It’s weird. I feel like I could watch another 50 people get cut open after I left that place. I could only imagine working there 30 years like our tour guide.”
For others, the trip was a logical extension of the class.
“Mrs. Minoletti talked up the field trip a lot, so I just figured I had no option,” senior Dan McClellan said. “I wanted to see them rip open bodies and see a dead person get cut open. It may seem weird, but after all the class time studying it, you become interested in what it truly looks like under the skin.”
