Upper class white guilt

So, this chick that works in my office brought up in a totally casual conversation that she used to be a mortician. I guess she went to college to get a BA in Physical Training and went on to get an MA in Kinetics or something…Then somewhere between her joining the Marines and getting out of 6 years of college, she decided to go to school to learn how to cut people open and embalm them. I was like “WTF”..why why would you do that? She got a scholarship to play bball in college so basically she got her degrees for free… So, after 6 yrs of her life paid for, she said she wanted to give back to humanity, that she had that “Upper class white guilt” and she needed to do something to give back to the community. Best quote of the day. To become a mortician all you need is a Bachelor’s degree, and then you go to school for a year to learn how to embalm, cut people up, etc and you can become a licensed mortician. For her, she isn’t religious and she isn’t too sensitive to gore and bodily mutations… Anyhow, so after I got over the fact I was completely grossed out, I started in with my questions.

1. bloodlovehopeluststeam: How do you drain the blood? Mortician Marine Physical Trainer Extraordinaire : You make a cut near the collarbone and slice the artery down the middle. Then you start pushing the embalming fluid through and from the arteries it gets pushed through all of the veins. When the fluid starts coming out the other side more clear than regular blood, bam, you’re done! You have to drain the organs as well because they’re full of blood.

2. BLHLS: Gross, how do you do that..push on them until it comes out of a hole somewhere? MMPTE: No, you take a huge syringe and insert and suck all the blood out. Then you inject the organs with concentrated  embalming fluid. It’s not possible to get all the blood out, usually only 80% of it.

3. BLHLS: So, after the syringe is full, where does the ….ick….go…?  MMPTE: It goes into barrels under the mortuary and gets stored there until they come to drain it.

4. BLHLS: Wow…that’s disgusting. MMPTE: Yeah, it’s how hospitals do it.

5. BLHLS: Do the families bring clothes, or how do you decide what they wear? MMPTE: Usually the families bring in clothes, but if it’s someone from a nursing home and they don’t have anything appropriate to wear we have clothes for that. Sometimes the family brings in an outfit they wore twenty years ago, and I’m like ‘Come on, seriously? How the hell am I going to get them into this??’. BLHLS: So what do you do? MMPTE: I make it work, whatever it is, I get them into it, sometimes we have to cut the whole back of the shirt, or the sides, but I get them in the clothes.

6. BLHLS: Do you do their makeup? MMPTE: Yeah, we do airbrush actually. BLHLS: Even to guys? MMPTE: Yeah, them too. We had this one lady that was missing one side of her cheek. You could see her  teeth and tongue through her cheek. We had to reconstruct her face and airbrush over it. She had skin cancer. And, one time we had a lady who had a huge tumor growing out of her side. Like, the size of a basketball. We had to drain it. BLHLS: Wait wait, what? How do you not go to the hospital for that sort of thing and get it checked out. People don’t just wake up one day, roll over, and realize there is a GD beach ball growing off of them. MMPTE: You’d be surprised how some people just don’t take care of themselves. They just never go to the doc, and then one day it gets so bad that they have to, and they go to the hospital and die.

7. BLHLS: What happens if you don’t embalm them…does a day or two really make a difference? MMPTE: Yes, they need to be preserved for a few days or so so the family can all make it into town. It needs to be done as soon as possible after the body is delivered.

8. BLHLS: How do you not vomit when you smell them, or when you have to cut them open?? MMPTE: It’s pretty gross, but I have a high tolerance for that stuff somehow, and I’m not religious at all, so that helps. BLHLS: So, do the organs squirt out at you ever when you’re draining them? MMPTE: YES, all the time. BLHLS: Do you wear a cover over your face, ick what if it gets in your MOUTH. MMPTE: Yeah, we do. Especially for autopsies. When the body stops circulating blood, the gasses and whatnot gets caught up in the body. Dead people are nasty, I don’t care who you are.

9. BLHLS: Do you have to do autopsies ever? MMPTE: Yeah, you cut in a Y-shape on their — BLHLS: ah, oh oh, like on TV? Like in the movies right? MMPTE: Yeah, like on TV. You cut a Y-shape from the collar bones towards the center and then on down past the belly button and then you open it up to examine all the organs. BLHLS: That’s fucking gross.

 So, I just googled autopsy and for some reason pictures of Michael Jackson and aliens are the images that come up.

Speaking of things that creep me out…

1. Unescorted TCN’s on base

2. Spiders, the big ones

3. Small towns that have two zip codes…..??

4. Styrofoam & cotton balls

I’m making out my xmas cards and getting more and more frustrated by the second. Can everyone just get old and stay in one place!??! All these name changes and frequent re-locaters. I’m prob the one who moves the most, but STILL! Ugh. My address book looks like Wolverine had his way with it. This is about the only time of the year I send post by snail mail, unless I have a random package to mail.

You know what’s better than beer? Root Beer! Eating a lil salad with Olive Gardressing. One of my friends was gracious enough to mail me some = ) No OG over here. We got Chilis, Bennigan’s, Fridays, ‘Bee’s, but no OG. It’s a damn shame.