I see dead people (again)

After my first G5, I then got a trip to the mortuary for a tour. Oh joy. My sergeant has offered me the chance to view a morning's-worth of autopsies, which I politely declined. Do you know what happens in an autopsy? Well, yes, obviously they cut up dead bodies in search of the cause of death. What I mean is, has the process been descibed to you?

On my mortuary tour I was led round by a worker with the driest sense of humour in the world. As we were standing in the autopsy room I received a blow-by-blow account of how each body is hacked up. The chest cavity is ripped apart to access all the organs, which are pulled out and individually weighed. The facial tissue is peeled off like a mask to access the skull, the top half of which is cut off and the brain scooped out. The brain cavity is stuffed with newspaper or anything else that comes to hand, as the mushy remains of the brain are placed in a plastic bag with the organs and sewn back into the chest. I was on the verge of losing my lunch at the description, so I know I'd make a big mess of the autopsy room if I had to watch that.

The technician then showed me the freezers, wheeling out corpse after corpse, demonstrating the best way to get rings off (you don't want to know) and telling me how each died. He described the best way to get particularly large bodies down flights of stairs (take a guess) and told be my task on those occasions would be to barricade the living room door so the rellys couldn't charge out to see what all the noise was. He was, in short, the most un-PC person I've come across since my training started, and my sergeant was stood at the back of the room visibly cringing as me and my colleagues either tried not paying attention to the more dodgy comments, or stood sniggering along (I was in the former group, of course). Proper gallows humour, it seemed, and the tech didn't give a stuff. He'd been doing the job for over 20 years, so I guess it takes a certain sort to put up with those sights day after day.