Mom’s hospital story

My mother works in histology at a city hospital. She enjoys telling me terrible and gruesome tales of the things that happen at her work:

“We had a poor old girl die from an intercranial bleed-on at 9:15 wednesday night. She was an organ donor so they took her to surgery immediately afterward and took out her organs and her bones.

“At 3:00 PM on Thursday, Administration called me to see where the body was. We didn’t know there was a body in the morgue. I went back to the morgue and there she was: lying out in the room, no fridge, just flat (no bones), wrapped in paper, like a roast.

“I called her family, and her brother said the “county” was on the way to pick up the body so the morgue workers left the body out so the county workers could sign and get it.

“At 1:00 PM on Saturday, Administration called me. The woman’s brother had just called to tell Administration that the funeral home would be out later to get the body.

“I went back to the morgue, and sure enough, there in the same place, not refrigerated, is this flattened, two-day-old dead woman still laying there on the slab.

“By now she had rigor mortis, but of course she had no bones so she couldn’t poke up too much.

“Stuff was seeping out of her eyes because the eye bank had taken her corneas, and stuff was oozing out of her mouth, filling up the paper around her head.

“It was gruesome, but it’s also sad. Just think: this woman had donated her organs and tissue, doing the one last good thing she could do on earth, but once Surgery harvested them, they shoved her body aside.

“It’s really disrespectful.

“I called Administration, and they made Surgery get back in there and put the woman’s body in the fridge until the funeral home arrived.”