Bunking with bodies...EMS station/Morgue

[sirduke]

We have a morgue attached to our station, however it is at the very back of the building, next door to the coroners office. We are occasionally required to transport a body from scene to the morgue, or on occasion, required to deliever one to the crime lab in Atlanta. The morgue, as I stated is remote from the ambulance bays, and requires going completley around the building, so I guess we just don't associate it with the rest of the station.

As for being bothered by the bodies there, I'm not, nor have I heard any of my coworkers express any opinion on it either.

I don't have any great desire to deal with bodies, but neither do I have any repulsion or fear of dealing with them either. Could be life experience, or just me, don't know, but there it is.

The simple fact as I see it, is that death, is an inevidible part of living, and for sure a definite part of our job. I alway treat the body with respect, it was at one time, someone's loved one, and a human being, so in my humble opinion deserving of respect. This does get a bit difficult sometimes, when you are talking about a body that has been decomposing in a house for several days or weeks, but still, the fact remains, it is/was someone's loved one.

I guess the point of this rambling is to say that, you will have to learn to accept death and bodies as a natural part of life, and not dwell upon the tragedy. Everyone deals with things in their own way, and we learn to cope with it. Given time, I believe you will as well.

Good luck.

Oh, by the way Dust, some of us aren't as lucky to have the resources to be able to allow someone else to handle the corpse, so we have to accept that as part of the job or find something else to do.

One man's opinion...

[Dustdevil]

...the funeral home [s:416d13b4c9]hurst[/s:416d13b4c9] hearse...

I consider it an honor, and attempt to give the family a sense of final peace and respect.

I think that is a great point that should be clarified. When I speak against post-mortem involvement from EMS, that should not in any way be interpreted as a lack of respect, care, or concern for the deceased. I certainly do not feel that care of the dead is beneath me, any more than I feel like non-emergency transportation of the elderly is beneath me. It's not about me. As always, it is about the profession. And the elevation of the profession is dependent upon specialisation. That is, picking one job and doing it well, to the exclusion of others. Non emergency transport is not EMS. It is a completely different industry which should be completely separate from EMS, and that includes ME transportation. Trying to be all things to all people dilutes our focus and our mission. We should not be doing any job just because "hey, those guys have trucks, and they aren't doing anything else." That is firemonkey mentality. And it puts our prime mission in jeopardy. While ME transports are an important job, that deserves care, dignity, respect, and professionalism, it is not -- and should not be -- our job.

[firedoc5]

Our private service did body transport for local funeral homes. We had a couple of suburbans just for that. Whenever we did an interstate transfer of a pt. (living) we would have to do a "turn around call" to check in with our dispatch. Occasionally they would assign us to pick up a body if it was on our way back. It was a real hassle. And a few times there would be an emergency toned out just as we were getting back into our county and we had to decline because we had a body.

I had one partner that was dead tired (pardon the pun) one night. We'd been up for about 32 hrs. and was on the way back from Springfield, IL and we had to pick up a body at the same hosp. we delivered out pt. to. So on the drive back Mary decided she needed to lay down. I told her to just lay down on the squad bench. But she declined saying that she wasn't going to lay down next to a dead body. I called her a chicken so she went ahead and layed down just to prove me wrong.

Actually I think she was just trying to get out of relieving me from driving half way so I could catch some ZZ's. I wouldn't have had a problem laying back there either.

I know dead bodies can freak some people out. But in EMS, whether you regularly deal with them or not, you shouldn't be freaked out. But don't worry, after awhile you get use to it.

[Richard B the EMT]

1) Yes, ambulances were formerly a mainstay of the funeral home business, as who else had a long vehicle where you could lay down a patient or a corpse?

2) The original municipal EMS station in Staten Island was a historic building, in the regard that it was the first morgue to have the refrigerated holding chambers in the entire United States. Regrettably, the building was lost in a fire some years ago, and the station moved to a new building across the street onto the grounds of the Seaview Hospital.

3) The municipal EMS station at Queens General Hospital is on one end of a building that, last time I was there, was on the opposite end of the building from the Queens County morgue. Separate entrances, at least, also on the exact opposite ends of the building, with no garage space for the ambulances. Due to construction, I do not know if any of this remains the case for the building's current usage.

4) One partner I worked with, who admitted to be in the FDNY EMS as a stepping stone to follow his dad, a FDNY Captain (if memory serves me correctly), into the fire fighting side of the FDNY, gave me some concern on one response. At a time we still transported DOAs to the morgue, my unit was assigned to transport a shooting victim from the scene of the shooting (after the CSIs and the NYPD Crime Scene Unit were done), to the aforementioned Queens County morgue. This type call is done with absolutely no L&S, as it should be.

It also is the only call where we don't have to have an EMT or Paramedic in the back with the "patient".

Most at my station regarded this EMT as "strange". My voice was added to this, when, in order to continue reading his studies needed to become a fire fighter, he decided to ride with the deceased, so he could continue reading! There was no directive saying he couldn't do this, so I drove the ambulance, with him in the back, reading, accompanying the occupied body bag.