Coroner Lamaze

I was at the Coun­ty Coro­ner’s Office yes­ter­day for a meet­ing about redo­ing their web­site, cur­rent­ly one of the old­est in the Coun­ty. After the meet­ing we were giv­en a tour of the facil­i­ties, which are impres­sive. I learned a lot about their pro­ce­dures, saw where the autop­sies are per­formed [on the top floor, with plen­ty of win­dows], saw the safe where all of the weapons that result in a death by acci­dent or sui­cide are kept, and even saw a bit of a train­ing autop­sy. Those few sec­onds, being a few feet away from hol­lowed corpse were much dif­fer­ent than watch­ing the Stan Brakhage film on the sub­ject and my sub­se­quent poem about it. The actu­al event is much more fraught, I left with the feel­ing that work­ing at the Coro­ner’s office must demand a very spe­cif­ic met­tle for all parts of the job. I don’t know if I could work with unknown corpses, know­ing that infec­tious dis­ease trans­mis­sion like Hepati­tis B is a very real pos­si­bil­i­ty. Even tran­scrib­ing the autop­sy reports must be a rel­a­tive­ly sur­re­al act.

Their foren­sic pho­tog­ra­phy and video depart­ments are very very capa­ble and man­age some extreme­ly inter­est­ing tricks with their equip­ment.

At the oth­er end of the spec­trum, today Deb­bie and I went to our one-shot lamaze class. Six hours long, it ate up our Sat­ur­day, but was quite infor­ma­tive. When we were doing one of the var­i­ous breath­ing tech­niques, I had to count on my fin­gers at Deb­bie, and acci­den­tal­ly flipped her off. Of course, she cracked up and every­one thought she was the crazy one, not me.

Whew.