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« on: November 27, 2015, 10:27:14 PM »
Peacefully in my sleep.
On the topic of good/bad deaths, here's an extract from "Working Stiff", a biographical insight into the life of a NYC medical examiner, and her description of the worst death she ever examined.
Apologies if it's too gross.
"Sean Doyle was a restaurant bartender who went out drinking after work on Friday night with a friend named Michael Wright and Wright's girlfriend. They were walking home in the early hours of the morning when Doyle apparently said something his buddy didn't like. "Wright thought Doyle was making a pass at his girlfriend, and he got pissed off," the detective said. "And he's a big guy." A housting match turned into a shoving match, though the girlfriend claimed the two men were just "joking around". Wright himself later described the altercation to the police as "roughhousing". Detective Kenne, however, had heard the 911 tape.#
"Someone is getting the stuff beaten out of him down there!" a neighbour told the operator. The neighbour's husband came on the line and claimed a man was screaming, "No---don't break my legs!" The police later interviewed several eyewitnesses who saw "a big guy whaling on a little guy." One told a security guard at an adjacent building, "I saw it all---he threw the guy in!"
The open manhold had a plastic chimney over it, to vent steam from a broken main while Consolidated Edison repaired it. There was an eighteen-foot drop to the boiling water on the bottom of the steam tunnel. The Con Ed supervisor who talked to our MLI at the scene stated that it was 300° down there, where Sean Doyle landed. Police and paramedics arrived quickly but couldn't get DOyle out. They had to wait for Con Ed to shut off the main, and even then it was far too dangerous to send a rescuer into the steam tunnel. Doyle wasn't dead when the Con Ed workers first arrived, the MLI's report told me. They said he was arching his back and reaching upward to them. He was screaming.
It took four hours to retrieve the body. The MLI took the corpse's temperature before bagging him up, as is protocol in a death by hyperthermia. It read 125°, she wrote in her report, "though it was probably more, because the thermometer only goes up to 125°."
Doyle's body was leathery to the touch, twisted, and glistening with beads of clear water. The outer layer of epidermis was peeling of his hands, feet, shoulders, and legs. His mouth was a black-lined O of burned tissue, his eyes cloudy. Every inch of skin was bright red. The man on my autopsy table had been steamed like a lobster.
"Why is he sitting like that?" Detecive kenne, who was observing the autopsy, asked me. Doyle's knees were bent and his hips angled in.
"It's called a puglistic pose. The long muscles contract from the heat. It makes the arms and legs curl and can sometimes break bones".
"How's it do that?"
"You know how your steak shrinks when you cook it?" I said. "Same thing."
Doyle's heat-contracted muscles didn't break any of his bones. Neither did the plunge through the manhole. Despite having been beaten up and then sustaining a fall of eighteen feet, he had very little blunt trauma. No hemmorrhaging, no head trauma at all. I wish I had found head trauma. It was hard to perform the autoposy knowing that the man had been conscious when he sustained the horrifying thermal injuries I was seeing. I couldn't evaluate where he had sustained any bruises, because the tissues that show contusions were all cooked. I couldn't find any abrasions because his skin's outer layer had largely peeled off. His liver wasn't bloody and red like a normal one, nor was it floppy and pale from exsanguination. It was brown and firm. Same with the heart, kidney, spleen, and all the other viscera. Even the brain had been scalded solid. Veins and arteries had turned to sausage.
Third-degree thermal burns destroy nerve endings--- but because this poor man had suffered a steam burn and there was no flame involved, the nerve tissue in the dermis was not damaged. He would have suffered terrible agony from the burns to his skin, and from his organs cooking internally.
When I opened Sean Doyle's trachea, I found foam in his airway. His lungs had filled with fluid as thermal injury started to break them down, and each breath whipped up an edematous froth, making it harder to draw air. That air came in at a searing temperature, damaging the flesh of his upper airway and swelling his trachea, asphyxiating him. At the same time the physiologic stress of the extreme heat was driving up his blood pressure and heart rate. Hyperthermia was swelling his brain. Any one of these three mechanisms---asphyxia, cardiac arrest, or hyperthermic cerebral edema---could have been the proximate cause of death. Any one of them would have been sufficient to kill him, and the physical evidence told me they had been working in concert. This was "thermal injury due to steam and scald burns," Sean Doyle's cause of death."
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