So today I had the responsibility of filling in my first death certificate and cremation form. The patient was a 75 year old lady who had come into the Emergency Department with sudden onset severe headache and collapse and was found to have had a massive unsurvivable intracranial haemorrhage. She came to ITU for some TLC and palliation in the absence of anywhere else for her to go and passed away peacefully a couple of days later.
Filling in the cremation form is a fairly long process as it has to be very detailed because once the body has been cremated there's no reassembling it to perform any further post mortem tests. The doctor also gets paid around £80 for taking the time to fill it in - "Ash Cash".
Part of the process is to examine the body (which I wasnt quite expecting) so I took a rather apprehensive medical student to the morgue for moral support and was met by an utterly stereotypical morgue assistant with somewhat squinty eyes and an unusual gait. He led us into an enormous fridge lined room and located my lady who, typically, had been placed in the top slot of a four body high fridge. "You'll be wanting some steps," he growled. I looked up to the top slot and had visions of me having to clamber on top of the occupants of the other shelves to examine my lady. "Yes please".
The steps turned out to be ancient and rickety so I spent the duration of my examination wobbling and earnestly trying not to fall on top of the body. The patient looked as if she were asleep with her eyes open, and felt extremely cold and rubbery when I was feeling for a pacemaker. Having performed a "full external examination", I thanked Lurch and we left, to go and fill in the rest of the paperwork.
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