After completing this goal yesterday, I was torn between calling the experience worth it or not. Did I learn a lot? Yes. Would I recommend that everyone run down to the nearest county coroner’s office and ask to observe an autopsy? Eh…not really. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have thought long and hard about it and are prepared for what you will see. I adored doing the dissections during anatomy lab, but the autopsy was totally different. I hadn’t quite prepared myself for everything I would observe. The glorified pictures that were in my head came crashing down after the first incision…and I almost went crashing down to the floor. I struggled to make it through and had to excuse myself at one point to get some fresh air.

I will spare you the details. Autopsies are very important and I don’t want to scare anyone away from making an already difficult decision about their deceased loved one. I was a little surprised and disappointed with my reaction to the entire experience. I never tried to treat my cadaver in lab as anything less than a person who had donated an amazing gift to us, and I never had issues dealing with death in that setting. But with a fresher body, after learning her story, this inability to separate the corpse from the woman she had been a mere two days before was a problem.

She was only in her lower 50s – younger than my mom. Her lovely diamond wedding ring was still on her left hand – my mind was flooded with everything that piece of jewelry represents. I felt uneasy when I noticed that her watch was still ticking – a reminder that her time had ended, but the world just kept on going without her. I saw that the man on the next table had an odd deep purple impression running under his jaw, wrapping from the front all the way back to his ear, and my suspicions were confirmed. He was a suicide victim who had died by hanging. I have been very lucky in my life, and this was the first time I had ever been faced with suicide. It just added a new level of emotion to deal with that morning.

The experience really made me think about death in a way I never had to before. I am thankful for having had the opportunity to observe an autopsy, but I will probably not be excited to do it again in the near future. I discovered that I will NOT be going into forensic pathology, but I have a lot of respect for people who are able to work at the coroner’s office. If I had to be surrounded by death all day long, to see the bodies of murder and suicide victims or the decaying corpse of an elderly man who was left to rot at home for days because he had no close friends or family to check on him, I would be seriously depressed.

So in the end I decided to mark this goal as not worth it, even though I felt that it was personally a worthwhile experience. I hope that those who are thinking about observing an autopsy will read this post and make sure they are well prepared. I think that we see these things in crime shows all the time and are curious to see it in person, but it is totally different when you are close enough to touch the cold flesh. If you are truly excited to observe an autopsy, go for it and I hope you enjoy. But if you are having reservations, I would recommend you hold off until you are ready, because I could see how the experience could be quite traumatic for some. There is a part of me that still feels yesterday morning was just something I watched in a movie.