I'm a forensic medic - death and injuries examiner. My work is about both law and medicine. Unfortunately, it's mostly about bad endings. About murders, lethal accidents, suicides, violence. About human stupidity cause most of these cases are caused by someone's dumb actions or drunkness wich is also dumb. Some of this cases may be interesting from medical point of view or as an examples that you'd better NOT follow. I'm not really sure if anyone will be interested in reading about this, but I'll try it anyway.
ATTENTION! The following post contains some description that can be unpleasant to someone.
I think I'll start with one of the most complicated and rare examinations I've performed. It was a few years ago, I was sent to another city for a month to replace its examiner during his vacations. It was a city far in the North, near the polar circle. It was April, but it was still cold and the city was covered with snow and coal mine fumes.
I've returned to a flat I rented after quite a tiresome day of work at morgue. After a really pleasant hot bath I started making dinner. A deer steak was murmuring something on a hot frying pan, filling the kitchen with tasty and peculiar smell (it was the first time I've tried a deer meat). I was anticipating a filling dinner and calm evening when I got a phone call. A number of local police station on the phone screen wasn't a pleasant thing to see - it most probably meant they need me for an accident scene investigation. But what I heard when I picked the phone was even worse.
"We have a helicopter crash" - they said. I've imagined a size of territory that will be covered in blood and body remains from a crash of a big transporter helicopter and I can swear my teeth were clanging when I replied "How many?"
The reply "one" was the most revealing thing I've ever heard in my life. So I had to turn off the fire under the pan and soon I was heading to the crash site.
Have you ever seen a snow-covered tundra? I hadn't - until that day. I went out of the car and saw it. It was breathtaking. It was vast. It was white. It was pure. A snow-covered plain, wherever you look, and the rays of the setting sun threw a colourful splashes on it. Somewhere at the huge distance stood the grey mountains, its silhouettes blurred with a veil of mist. And in the middle of this masterpiece created by nature was an artificial stain of black and red. A pile of distorted metal that one could barely recognize as a remains of a small helicopter and a human shaped figure connected to the vehicle by a wide trace of blood-covered snow.
The pilot was lying face-down, he had no helmet on him. Multiple bone fractures caused by a hard fall turned his body into a marionette doll, his body parts could be moved and twisted independently. When I turned him face-up, I saw a deep wound in his forehead. The still hot blood seeped from the wound, melting a snow under his face.
The next day I performed a corpse examination. The wound in his forehead was caused by a metal fragment of the helicopter panel - the hit was so hard it pierced even the bone and went deep into the brain. The man's spine was torn in half, his organs severly damaged and mostly turned into a bloody pulp. He had no chances to survive.
The pilot was a buisenessman, quite a rich one. He owned the vehicle. He had no pilot license. He hadn't informed the authorities about his flight. He wasn't drunk, but that meant nothing - he just had not enough skills to control a vehicle in a poor weather conditions anyway. The moment he sat in the helicopter that day he signed his own death sentence.
Please let me know if you find this at least a bit entertaining and if there is a reason to post more cases.
"Please don't tap on the glass. Penguins can see and hear you alright. They just don't care."
