Roller Derby

The hubby and I went with some good friends to a roller derby match this weekend. When I moved back to my hometown I was looking forward to becoming a derby girl, but have yet to do so. All the guys at work think I should do it, and the hubby, now that he's seen a match, is also on board with it, so I think maybe next month I'll show up to practice. Now, I don't know if roller derby is big everywhere in the US, but there are quite a few teams out west and the matches are well-attended. Kids under 10 are free to boot, and there are always quite a few of them there. Anyway, once the girls have me on their team I'll let you know what my derby name is.

My day, or, in which there are problems

The thing that really sucks about being an embalmer that also meets with families is just that, you do both. This morning I started embalming a case at 8:40 (after our weekly meeting) and knew I had a family to meet at 10:30, which normally would be fine. Here is a list of everything that went wrong with the case I embalmed:

1. He wasn’t on blocks when I got into the prep room. Now, if any of my readers are embalmers, I am about to sound like a spoiled, whiny, girly embalmer chick, which is fine. Opie, my back-of-the-house coworker, gets to work at about 6:30am and gets a lot of body prep done before I even show up, and is really good about putting the cases to be embalmed up on blocks (plastic or metal footed boards that go under the deceased at the shoulders, hips and feet to allow water to flow over their backside) and with a sheet over them so that when the embalmer arrives they can get right to work. Well, this guy (the one to be embalmed) was big, like 220 or so, and I am not big. Now, you need to know that I don’t like asking for help, especially here at work where the guys all tell me that I shouldn’t be lifting bodies since I'm a girl and girls just aren’t made to lift things, but there was no way I was going to be able to lift him while placing a block under him, so I had to get help.

2. The deceased had what we call “skin slip” on his arms. Skin slip is what it sounds like, the skin slipping and tearing, and then oozing from the place that the skin should be. This happens because the fascia under the skin decomposes enough to “let go” of the skin on top of it, and when the body is moved the skin just slips right off. Gross, yes, but at least it doesn’t smell. This guy was also a bit edematous, which aides in the skin slipping.

3. I nicked a vein. Yeah, so apparently I’m not that great at being careful. I opened the supra-clavicular (yay! embalming term!!) incision I made, and started my search for the artery, and wouldn’t you know, I broke a little vein which started to leak blood all in the incision and get in the way of my finding the artery, that little shit. So now I stick my finger (gloved, of course) in the hole and feel around for the artery (in school they always said that we should be able to find the artery with our fingers, not our eyes, probably for situations just like this), which I found, thank god. It feels like a large, wet rubber band, just in case you wondered, unless the person was really sclerotic, in which case it feels like sand inside a balloon.

4. I wasn't getting any fluid in the legs. Like none at all. So, I made incisions in each leg to find the femoral arteries. It took a while, and by the time I was done with the second leg it was time to meet with my 10:30 family which was:

5. fifteen minutes early. Easy arrangement though and I was back in the prep room at 11:30 to finish up the embalming I had left, which is not normal AT ALL, fyi. He actually ended up looking pretty good, and here are the good things that happened after all the problems:

1. I got to leave at 4:15, the time at which I had requested to leave in order to make my five o'clock:

2. HAIR APPOINTMENT!!! I haven't gone to a 'real' salon in months, it was one of the things I said I'd sacrifice in order to move to my home town and rent an apartment while still owning a house in another town that was not going to sell. I look awesome, and my hairs are like an inch long, but yet still non-manish (or at least not totally man-ish)

3. My hubby and daughter are out of town for the night, so my favorite sister (the youngest) and I went for cocktails to the spot that my boss and his girlfriend were, and we drank for free. Yay for free drinks, right?

4. I get to sleep with the windows open. It's like 78 degrees out right now and I think I'm in heaven.

I can't complain

We’re still slow. The boss was chatting with the office manager, Big Bird, and somehow BB convinced him that we (the three of us women) should go shopping instead of stay in the office, and then go to lunch together, and also got him to give us cash to pay for lunch. It sounds like fun, and I’m totally into it, but it makes me wonder what the boss has in mind for the guys of the office to do. Stripper, maybe? Have a keg delivered? Watch something good on the flat screen in the (unused so far this week) chapel? Hmmm…

Dying of boredom

Jane, the main embalmer here, is out of town starting today until next Tuesday. She is going fishing, which is funny. I’ve never gone fishing for reasons other than being hungry while backpacking, and so never used a fishing pole. I don’t even really like fish, so the whole fishing thing seems lame, or boring or something. So, she’s all excited about a week of fishing and can’t wait to be wherever it is that she’s going. So, that means I’ll be embalming more than usual this week, and meeting with (hopefully) less families. I never like being the director that meets with a family and the embalmer for their deceased relative, mostly because I tend to feel like that is creepy for the family. I mean, my name is listed on the death certificate of anyone I embalm, and for some reason I think that families don’t really want to know the person that did the embalming. I suppose that its weird for me to think that, I mean, the general public doesn’t actually know what embalming really is, so they probably don’t pay much attention to the name listed on the death certificate.

Monica, the new girl, says she’ll help me out in the prep room, and I told her to bring some tennis shoes to keep here at work (it sucks to have to embalm in four inch heels, even if it is sexier), and that I would make her a cute apron. Back when I started at this mortuary I made myself a kick-ass apron out of oil cloth (that stuff that plastic tablecloths are made out of, with the fuzzy backing) that I wear in the prep room. The fabric store had a lot of different patterns of oil cloth and I chose a black and white toile pattern, and plain red accents (pockets, straps and edging). It probably isn’t quite OSHA compliant, but it works for me, and is definitely cuter than the space suit crap the funeral home buys. And the pockets are wonderful.

We are really slow right now, almost painfully so. It’s a funny thing to wish that we were busier, especially since that would mean death for people, but I can’t help it. I spent the morning organizing the prep room and the makeup cart, and am thinking about going to Target (love that place) to stock up on a few “normal” makeup products, as well as a few other supplies that I use during restoration. Hopefully I can leave soon…

Famous people death game

Okay, there’s this game that I used to play with some friends. At the beginning of the year we would submit twenty dollars and a list of ten famous people that we thought would die that year to the leader of the game. Then we would wait. All year. At the end of the year we would look over our lists and add up our points. This is an example of how it would work with the points, say, if Michael Jackson was on one of the lists: Michael’s age, 50, subtracted from 100, which would give you 50 points for that person. Now, it is uncommon to get 50 points for just one person, as it isn’t as likely for someone ‘young’ to die, and therefore such people don’t tend to make the lists of our death game. Now, this would have been a good year for some youngs, had they been on people’s lists, but they are not. But it is a fun game, and I encourage you to try it, and the winner of the year gets everyone’s buy-in.

Lazy Friday

My boss told me yesterday at 4 that I could take the day off today unless we got really busy overnight, which apparently we didn't. So today my daughter and I, along with the family I nannied for back years ago, went to a water park. It was hot as hell today and the place was busy, but we had a great time playing around in the water and eating hot dogs.

This week at work was a week full of ship-outs. A ship-out is when we arrange for human remains to fly out of state or out of the country. I had two that were international shipments, and the funeral home had three that were out-of-state transfers. The out-of-country ones are a bit more work, as we have to get the consulate of the receiving country involved and they approve of the shipment before the human remains can board a plane. I also do consulate work for a couple of other funeral homes when they have remains to ship to Mexico, which is quite often, and I do all the translations for the Mexican Consulate and then they file the papers. The death certificate and transit permit, as well as the certified embalmer's letter all have to be translated, and it's always fun to learn how to say different causes of death in Spanish. I'm actually getting quite good at it.

So, I hope you all have a good fourth, I plan on sitting by a pool and drinking beer all day, and hope yours is as relaxing as I intend for mine to be.

What have I done now?

I know I'm not the only one to think that I might have jinxed myself, but when I wrote the post the other day about how my friend's parents are going to start dying I didn't think it would happen so soon.

My mom and dad are in Canada right now. There's a gal at our church that I am fairly good friends with (her roommate and I are quite close, so we see each other occasionally) and she is very close with my mom who has kind of adopted her since her mom lives out of state. So this gal, she comes over for holidays and my mom always does a birthday dinner thing for her and she gets along with my sisters as well, and is about my age (maybe a year younger). Anyway, my mom's cell phone doesn't work in Canada (what's with that?) but she's been emailing me everyday to check on us and on our grandma, and last night her email read that the gal's mom had died suddenly and that she didn't know what to do, and was on her way to the state her mom lived in, and my mom wanted me to call the gal to see what I could do to help her and answer her questions, so I did. And it sucks, not being where I can really help her, and just making calls to different funeral homes and cemeteries. I know I'm helping, just not as much as I want to. And deep down I know I didn't jinx her mom, but it just makes me feel odd, you know?