Preserving Sanity

It makes you feel a bit like an astronought, and takes a bit of getting used to.
First there’s scrubs, then a full length gown that ties up at the back, big white rubber boots, a plastic apron, waterproof over sleeves, gloves and a visor.
The visor is right up there when it comes to importance. Having formaldehyde, even a very diluted 5% solution, squirted in your eye is not something you forget. It’s only happened to me once, and it was akin to a big, angry, fat-bodied hornet forcing it’s stinger right into my pupil, over and over again.
So you get all dressed up, and for the first few weeks of your training, loiter around in the background, watching in horror/interest as person after person is cleaned up and preserved in front of you.

You never forget the first time you see a human spine from the inside, or when you have to open the sutures after a cranial autopsy so you can plug the leaks that spring into life when the brain has be disconnected. That’s the worse time for eye accidents, when you’re peering into the skull, and suddenly a geyser of toxic chemicals shoots out of the nowhere.
And then they step away, hand you a collection of tubes and instruments, and let you get on with it.
You many have a head full of theory and done your time observing, but it’s not the same as being given a dead person of your own, and feeling their coldness seep through your gloves.

So much responsibility.
I look upon my dead as my ones. It took me a long time to stop whispering apologies as I pushed my scalpel into their flesh. To this day I still say it silently sometimes, so the lads can’t hear me and laugh at my consideration. I used to talk to my dead, tell them what I was going to do, so they wouldn’t be scared.

I can’t let them be taken away until they look perfect. All smells and traces of pain and suffering removed, and hair and make up just how it should be, how they’d have worn it.
I use every trick in the book to make them look comfortable. Never alive, that would be weird, just like them, but peacefully dead.
Modesty is something I always preserve, dignity must be constantly protected. No one is ever fully naked on my table. Even when I wash them I position cloths and move them only when necessary, and only briefly. And unlike my colleagues, I never say ‘it’, I always refer to them by name, or at least but ‘him’ or ‘her’. Never ‘it’. Never.

Maybe that’s why they picked me.
I found the first one sitting on my doorstep. he was naked, his hair shaven from the operation that had gone wrong and taken his life. He had his arms across his Y incision, as if it was more embarrassing than his nudity for him.
I was in my nightdress. It was gone midnight and I had been warm and cosy in my clean sheeted bed, but then I had remember the dustbin was being emptied at the crack of dawn, and so not for the first time, I ventured outside, my bare feet on the concrete and a chilly breeze penetrating my nightie.
When I opened the door and saw his back I stopped, frozen, but then he turned round, and I recognised him as an occupant of my table from a week before. I was determined to convince myself that he wasn’t there, so I kept going, dragged the bin to the kerb and walked back to the house with my head down. He stood up, and motioned his head towards my open door.

I heard my voice asking him if he wanted to come in. He nodded, and I realised his lack of words stemmed form the fact his mouth had been sewn shut, and his cheeks filled with putty as an attempt to restore some of the fleshiness his illness had taken away.
I showed him into the living room, stopping on my way at the laundry cupboard. He may be a figment of my imagination, or a dream, but regardless of that I didn’t want his naked butt on my sofa.
I sat opposite him, and saw that he was looking at me through the clear plastic gripped eye caps that are designed to stop his eyes from pinging open and scaring the life out of his family when they come to view him.
I found myself making a mental note that if I ever woke up from this, I’d talk to my boss about ordering a different brand, as these were not standing up to testing.
I asked him if he wanted anything, and he nodded towards the television. I handed him the remote and he started to watch wrestling. After ten minutes I though I’d better get back to bed.
I nearly choked on my pop tart when the next morning I rounded the corner into the living room and there he still was, watching the early morning news.

I’m guessing he must have told his friends, as there was an elderly woman playing with my radio when I got into my car at the end of the day. I remembered her as Mrs Sophia Lily Montgomery, I often make note of the interesting names I meet, stowing them away for (hopefully) future babies. She was dressed in the pale blue gown she had been buried in, which made me wonder what had happened to my wrestling fan’s clothes. She joined him on the sofa and there they sit, in silence, in stillness.

I constantly tell myself it’s all a dream, or more likely, that I’m having some kind of breakdown, but then there are times like yesterday. My neighbour Jeff was out mowing his lawn when I got home, and he came over to tell me about the music he had heard coming from my house while I was at work. He said he looked in the window, but couldn’t see anyone.
Incidences like that temporarily force me into accepting the situation, before I can blot away the disturbing feelings and go back to my way of living.
I wish their families could see them, and then they could go round to their houses. They could well be over the moon (or scarred for life) to have them back again.

I hope not too many more come along.
There was this little lad at work today, his mum wanted him well embalmed so that he could be put back on the sofa with his duvet and toys, where he had spent more of his short life of illness. She said she couldn’t bear for him to be put in a cold drawer, in a room full of dead people. I can see why, I wouldn’t want someone I loved in a cold drawer either, not while I could keep them at home, where they belong. Her pain and love for him was so tangible it made me cry, and I had to sneak off to the toilets.
I just hope I don’t find him on my sofa in front of my TV.