Mr. Unviewable

Things to learn so that this post makes more sense:

1. When a person dies and their cause of death is either unknown or due to an accident they are a coroner/medical examiner’s case.
2. When someone dies in an auto accident it is not always necessary to do an autopsy, as the COD (cause of death) can be fairly obvious, but they will run toxicology to test for things like drugs and/or alcohol.
3. When an autopsy is done the normal incisions are on the trunk (a Y-incision made from each shoulder to the sternum and down to the pubic bone) of the deceased and the head (across the top of the head (like a headband) from behind one ear to behind the other ear), which makes for more work during embalming.

So, Mr. Unviewable was not autopsied, his COD being very apparent from the looks of things. Normally that would be awesome, but in the case of this guy it makes for a bit of an inconvenience. See, when the skull is crushed, even just in a few places, the head incision really helps out because the bones can be wired together from the inside and then the skull filled for support (normally the brain would do that, but it is removed during the autopsy), which is a ton easier than trying to fix things from the outside, which is usually done by hypodermically injecting the face with a substance that pushes the bones outward toward the skin. The method of doing it that way sucks compared to the wire-and-fill method.

Anyway, Mr. Unviewable, without his head autopsy, took a bit of work this weekend. He didn’t have any deep head wounds, which is a blessing because of how long the hidden stitches take me, and a curse because it makes injecting the support substance easier, but after a while I got the left side of the face to come out so that the broken cheek bone was normal. The lower jaw was also broken in half, which is very common in auto accident cases, and that I took care of fairly easily with wire and a substance referred to in the funeral home as “peanut butter”. After those two major issues were taken care of I was on to the lacerations, which were many, but none of them were deep so I took care of them with medical glue (the kind that they use to glue cuts together at the hospital) for the most part, and a few with stitches. There will be four places on the scalp that I need to replace hair that was missing, and although that takes a lot of time, is not very hard to do, and will do that tomorrow.