And I’m not talking about autopsy videos or banned stuff, I’m talking about real life experiences…
Obviously I’ve seen gore, fatalities in traffic accidents and real executions videos but never live… The closest was the body of a guy laying on the concrete from a car accident, I was in a bus going in parallel with that car, but I’m not sure if he was dead…
I’m an orderly in an OR that does organ procurements from donors. The patients are already brain dead or otherwise intubated, but still technically alive. When the doctors open them up and get to where the organs are, there is a brief moment of silence and a prewritten letter in their honor is read aloud. After that they are taken off of life support and the organs are ready to be taken. The most interesting part to me is watching the color fade from their intestines. It’s actually very fast from pink to gray.
The most interesting part to me is watching the color fade from their intestines. It’s actually very fast from pink to gray.
That’s due to oxygen deprivation, right?
Yes. Without hemoglobin or myoglobin, flesh looks very dull. That’s why packaged meat is treated with carbon monoxide, keeps it looking red.
https://www.drweil.com/diet-nutrition/food-safety/is-meat-too-red-to-be-true/
Thanks for the education. :)
So how does organ donor work? Let’s say an organ donor dies in a car crash, could their parts be put on ice and transported to the nearest hospital where it’s needed? Or do they need to be rolled in alive?
The hospital I work is not a trauma hospital, so those types of patients dont come to us, but as far as I understand patients must be alive. Organs become unusable fast.
Damn, I could have done without reading that one.
I held my 14-year-old dog when he was put to sleep. I wanted him to feel loved until the moment he was gone. Putting my sadness aside so he could truly feel comforted was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.
i’ve done this with 3 cats, now.
i also sing to them until i can’t because of the crying…
edit: oh, great, now i’m crying at work…
You are kind. You did good.
I’ve been with every one of my pets when they were euthanized. It’s a horrible experience but I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Good on you for being there. I know a vet tech and she says too many people take the easy way out and just drop them off at the vet’s office. Their sick animals spend their last few minutes scared and looking for their owners. It breaks her heart every time.
just drop them off
This makes me morally and physically gag
Euthanasia is more humane than a lot of ancient humans’ last couple years.
That is what I did and what I do. I accept that duty the moment I begin to take care of them as a young puppy or rescue.
I felt the very last heartbeat of my step-father while holding his arm, on his death bed. He died peacefully at 98 years of age.
I witnessed 5 police officers all hit a man on the ground with their tasers. Broad daylight.
Died on the scene of a heart attack. Apparently natural causes. The polices internal investigations found the police did no wrong, imagine that.
Unless you make enough money that you can regularly “donate” to the force, I suggest that you assume they are not there to help you and you protect yourself accordingly
What country?
Not OP, but I would imagine most likely the US, though I admit that is by no means a certainty.
In Tacoma, Wa.
So, yeah, the US.
Did you record?
My grandmother. She was 96. She saw India’s Independence, and lived through the Bengal famine of 1943. What a life! She died in peace surrounded by family though.
I saw the immediate aftermath. Someone jumped off the 8th floor in an interior atrium after setting off the building fire alarm. I happened to look that way while evacuating and it took a moment to process what I was seeing.
Why did the pull the fire alarm!
I don’t think we will find out.
When I was a kid I saw an elderly man get hit by a car. He rolled over the top, which I guess is safer than being run down, but he got a lot of air and hit the pavement hard. Just kept rolling over and over. My parents shooed us away from the scene, but I can’t imagine it ended well for him.
One time I was riding a bus that rear-ended a motorcycle. I didn’t see the collision itself, but the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.
We often take for granted how dangerous traffic is. Your life can end in a moment doing something we casually do every day.
I was working in a department store when a middle-aged woman collapsed in front of me. It was really warm, heat exhaustion I supposed. She looked like maybe she was drunk because she was moving kind of erratically, so I went to see if she was okay and she just fell. I’ll never forget the sound her head made hitting the concrete or the fact that she didn’t even blink. Remarkably, she was okay and was up in a few minutes, walked away and everything, really surprised me.
The thing that probably fucked me up the most though was some videos on YouTube. I was working for a video analytics company, and we were trying to build an image classifier that could detect firearms. Well, you need data for that, so we were scraping videos of gun crime. Mostly what we were looking for was armed robbery. Lots of videos put out by the local police of somebody holding up a convenience store, and that wasn’t a big deal. But every now and then you’d find a video of someone getting shot and that really affected me. Eight hours a day of looking at gun crime with the occasional homicide peppered in was a recipe for disaster. I definitely needed therapy after that job.
Fucking hell man I hope your brain spared you all of the PTSD quirks after that…
…no 🥲
I’m doing a lot better now though
Technically he was probably already dead, but a guy on a bicycle was killed by a van right in front of my house. I heard a crazy noise followed by screaming so I went out to see. The guy was lying still by the side of the road. His bike was mangled about 30’ down the road where it had been dragged in the undercarriage. And his groceries for dinner that night were scattered along the gutter.
Fuck. This is why I don’t wanna drive bikes. Fear of a giant death machine headed my way
When I was a young teen, I watched my grandparents’ neighbor die of a heart attack in his boat. He leaned over - I thought to get a life jacket or something - and his boat just kept circling backwards. Not much to say. It took the ambulance over an hour to arrive. There was a very small pool of blood, maybe 2-3 inches in diameter, on the floor of the boat.
That’s it. Nothing exciting or traumatic.
Wait, heart attacks can result in blood loss?
Perhaps he hit something when he fell over.
True.
Yes, but not a person. I was 14, coming back from school, and I saw a kitten bleed to death. I kept walking on my way to home, but it saw us, and kept following and purring at us, limping in pain, maybe asking for water and aid, after it was probably hit by a car, or bitten and thrown around by dogs. It’s flesh wasn’t gouged or anything, there wasn’t anything gory about it, but it was bleeding profusely. I did nothing, because I wasn’t able to process what happened, and continued my way back home.
Yep. I held my father’s hand when he died. When it was over I hugged him and told him we’d be okay on our own now and that we’d manage.
I was mostly right. Mostly. The waves came and went and I thought I’d be over the worst - but now, a year later I sometimes miss the guy with a pain that feels like it will never end in that moment.
I planted a tree and put a bench under it at the end of a small valley where I now own some meadows and where we used to go together and chop firewood. When it gets too bad I take my dog up there and sit down and tell my dad what’s going on.
I’m sorry for your loss.
It’s bound to happen, right. However, it’s a thing I have to learn how to deal with and I’m pretty certain I’m going to finish that process as a different person.
Interestingly, being there at the bed wasn’t that hard. It was just the right thing to do and I would always want to be there again.
The part where I’m missing him hard is when I feel like picking up the phone because something good happened but then I realize, no, not today, not tomorrow either, never again.
Saw the aftermath of a pretty bad motorcycle accident, with the rider receiving CPR. It was confirmed later by the news that they didn’t make it. I was stuck at a light and able to see the scene for a few solid minutes, but it really didn’t impact me heavily. Honestly it felt even less relevant than footage I’d seen before since I was having to actually drive and my attention couldn’t be put entirely on the accident.
In contrast, I was there for a friend putting their dog down. The amount of emotion everyone was going through was much more pronounced - you could physically feel the sadness around you.
Seeing death always has an uneasy aspect to it, but I think the real impact comes from social ceremony. We choose to feel pain over it as a way to heal, I think.
When i worked in a hospital. My mom at home.
I was within 8 meters of someone dying twice, the second time I was less than 2 meters away.
The first was a truck driver with a load of cast iron pipes. Truck was on a slight angle, and when he undid the straps the load fell on him.
Second time was a load of stone going up a scaffold on a hoist, it hadn’t been secured properly and a guy cut through the exclusion zone and this 100kg stone window cill just…yeah. There wasn’t really a lot left of the top third of him.
I’ve had a lot of therapy about these and I still dream about the second one.
Yup, several times. The joys of working in healthcare.