The corpse blew soft puffs of sweet stale air in my face; wet gurgles from her chest rumbled in my ears as I turned the warm heavy body to prepare her for the undertaker.
Outside a blizzard was throwing a blanket of snow over the sleeping city. Everything was quiet but the wind. It was moaning and groaning; it shook the creaky hospital and jingled and jarred the glassware in the dim-lit sick room. My heart raced with the wind and my teeth chattered with the rattling windowpanes.
As I gently released the body blood seemed to flow in her face and neck. Startled, I checked the patient's pulse and felt fast throbbing beats. Swaying from fright, I grasped a chair for support as I sought my mirror and held it to the corpse's face. The glass was free of moisture. I sighed with relief, but in the next instant the nauseating fruity odor came again from the corpse, enveloping and suffocating me. I was sick.
My post-mortem care procedures had made no mention of these occurrences. I shuddered at the thought o the next step, stuffing her mouth with cotton from the mortuary basket. What should I do? What if Mrs. Corey were still alive?
This was my sixth month in the nurses' training school and my second look at a dead person. But Mrs. Corey looked alive! Her body was warm and pink, unlike the first corpse I had viewed, all pale, bony and cold.
I ran to find the charge nurse or the night physician. Hurrying down the gloomy hall, I heard the clanking elevator. "Oh no, it couldn't be the undertaker," I thought as an intern stepped from the grating vehicle. He half-listened as I poured out my story, then shrugged and asked, "Dr. Post's diabetic patient in room 313?"
I nodded.
"She was pronounced dead, wasn't she?" he huffed and then swaggered down the hall muttering something about student nurses.
Even so I was not reassured. I vividly recalled stories of reopened coffins showing deep fingernail scratches from struggles to escape. My fright heightened even more by these thoughts; I ran blindly up the corridor and collided with the chief medical doctor.
Listening to my disorganized story, Dr. Burke gently said, "Mrs. Corey is not alive. She had no pulsations; you only felt your own heart pounding away." He eased my mind about people being buried alive as he recounted the discovery of the stethoscope and its use in listening to body-generated sounds. He added some information about embalming.
Using layman's terms because of my inexperience, Dr. Burke briefly compared Mrs. Corey's living body to an engine containing fuel of incorrect mixtures of glucose and fat. The combustion products from burning this mixture led to unconsciousness or diabetic coma. The acetone breath scent came from these products and is characteristic of the disease. But a basket of overripe apples in a closed room will give off the same saccharine revolting stench.
"Now," Dr. Burke continued, "the dying woman was too weak to exhale all the stale air, but after death the movement of the body brought the air forth. Other bodily complications caused a stagnation of blood in her face and neck to give the pink coloration."
Thanking Dr. Burke, I resolved to write a nursing manual and include the rare occurrences that a student nurse may encounter in post-mortem care. I did.
No comments:
Post a Comment