This Party's Dead Anyway

We took a tour of the coroner's office today for one of our new programs. I almost didn't go into the freezer, but I didn't want to be the only one in my group to wimp out, so I went in.

The smell is the first thing you notice. It smells like a butcher's shop, only it's more of a rotting meat smell mixed with some fishiness. It's extremely pungeant. I can still smell it in my hair and I was only in there a few minutes. The bodies aren't kept in drawers the way they are on TV. Instead, it's a big, cold room with the bodies lined up on gurneys. The bodies are mostly covered except for the blue frozen feet that stick out with the toe tags on them.

As soon as I walked into the room, physiology took over. My whole body tensed up. I couldn't move. I started breathing erratically. I got dizzy. I thought I was going to pass out. The whole time I just kept telling myself not to pass out, that it'd be over any second. I would never be able to live it down at work if I passed out.

When they tried taking us deeper into the freezer where they kept the miscellaneous body-parts, I stayed put. Rows of blue feet were pretty much all I could take. Plus, I don't think I could move, even if I wanted to. At one point, a door behind me opened suddenly and I jumped. I don't know why. I was just so on-edge. It was like being in a haunted house.

The rest of the program was held in a classroom. We saw a lot of grizzly car accident photos. All the way home, I was crazy paranoid that I was going to get into a horrible car accident. Which is something I worry about all the time anyway, but this just made it 300% worse.

So, yeah, it was an interesting day at the office.