Too gross for comfort

Bernard Adams is charged with determining the cause of death according to Florida Statute chapter 406. Unless a person dies in the care of a physician or of old age, Adams will be determining the cause of death - also if they wish to be buried at sea, cremated or have their body donated to science. There are about 10,000 reported deaths every year in Hillsborough, most are cremated. The medical examiner gets about 1,600 to verify and of those about 1,300 are autopsied.

Adams definitely has his hands full, though I'm sure that's not the proper metaphor for a medical doctor who determines cause of death for a living. The question "...of what?" comes to mind.

He made it clear that not every corpse is autopsied. It isn't like flags unfurl, trumpets sound and the answer is revealed when you open someone up, he said. Most of the time he can tell just be looking and poking around. His office also does extensive investigations into family history and such when a person comes through their office.

Everyone there is in good humor. By this I mean morbid.

The toxicology lab was my favorite. Drug deaths are some of the most common in Hillsborough, so the place really gets put through its paces.

The names of the rooms in the tox-lab were Specimens Receiving, Extraction Lab and Instrument Lab (the gas mass spectrometers and chromatograph). The only essence of Sci-Fi wonderland missing was a blaring alarm and flashing red light. The air is full of beeps, whirrs of fans, the constant hum of the impressive air conditioning unit and punctuated by the occasional burst of compressed air.

Each person that comes through generates a file, that backs up for 10 years and is color-coded by a plastic tab on the end. Black for traffic fatality, yellow for suicide, red for homicide, orange for pending, and God knows what for pink and white. After their decade of duty these files are moved to the county records center.

The Medical Examiner's office is hardly a depressing place. The worst of it would not be the faint smell of death in the autopsy room, nor a plucked eyeball going splat on a table, nor the dry humor that comes with the place. It's the erasure of a person's existence and purifying it down to a folder, ear-marked by a colored tab, probably the same kind in a school supply section at a Wal-Mart or Target.