The First Day

Sorry I didn't get to write this last night, the internet at the hotel at which we're staying at is kind of messed up and none of us could get on last night.
The first day at the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's office was both what I had expected and yet at the same time, there were things that I would never have possibily imagined. After the bus ride into the morgue, we sat in on the pathologist's morning meeting, where they discussed the cases that they would be seeing that day. I was shocked to see that at least 10 cases a day was considered normal!
After the meeting, we met with Dr. Hyma, who is the chief medical examiner at the Miami-Dade morgue. From him, we found out that the Miami-Dade district served over 2 million people and was the largest district in Florida as well as the fact that around 3000 cases passed through the morgue every year.
We next toured the facility, which was amazing! This place is very extensive, and is considered to be the top of the line for morgues in North America. They have an extremely large autopsy room, bone room, toxicology lab, photography lab and auditoriums for lecturing. After the tour finished, we were separated into two groups. My group went to look in on the autopsy room for about an hour while the other group went into the bone room to work on a maceration.
It was completely surreal. I cannot begin to explain how different seeing an autopsy is from reading about it in a book or even watching it on a television screen. The first thing that I noticed, right off the bat, was the colours. The bright yellow colour of fat and the red muscles really stood out against the sterile grey walls and tiles. The autopsy we watched was someone who had got into a motorcycle accident and it was so unreal - I couldn't believe that I was actually watching it!
The 'fresh' bodies weren't really smelly, but the body that needed the maceration was - I don't have the words to be able to describe it. Luckily for my group, the other group had finished the maceraction by the time it was to switch, so we were tasked with packing up some bones for a DNA extraction project. This is really cool, as the US government are trying to sequence the DNA of the unknown deceased that they have in the bone rooms of all the morgues in the United States in order to match them with close relatives. This project depends on the missing person's family coming in and giving their DNA as well.
At this point, it was lunch time, so we all went back to the lounge and ate. At one, we met with Dr. Souviron, who is an expert forensic odontologist. An odontologist is someone who works with teeth, and Dr. Souviron is one of the foremost authorities on forensic odontologist in the United States, and gave testimony at the Ted Bundy trial. He gave a lecture on identification based on the teeth and bite mark analysis. I never really thought about how much a person could learn about a victim from their teeth, but he showed that even when a skeleton is found and is missing teeth post-mortem, he can find the person using dental records.
All in all, the first day was both completely overwhelming as well as completely amazing. I learned so much just from those few hours and cannot wait for the next two weeks!

~Amy