Elgin State Hospital Part V

Part of being trusted to take care of others who on some level cannot take care of themselves means really protecting the vulnerable. And who is more vulnerable than the dead? And the "mentally incapacitated" dead at that?

Don't think so?

One beautiful and perfect Sunday morning I woke up and quickly got ready for work. When I got to the cottage I was assigned to, it was just to be me and this portly little Grandma type aide for the day. She busied her bespectacled self with paperwork and I got in motion getting the gals ready to go for breakfast. But when I tried to rouse one woman to get up and get going, my chipper admonitions seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Whoops, drop the "f".  Change that to dead ears, because I immediately realized she was no longer with us as I neared the bed. It was shocking, seeing as this was a really nice normal seeming woman in her late 30s who had just checked herself in for a week or two of self imposed rest. Who does that? Nobody I had ever heard of. Maybe it was cheaper than Howard Johnson's, and at that place it was pretty much guaranteed that no hovering relatives would show up to visit and use the pool. I remember reading she had a 10 year old son, and I was devastated for him.

I went and told my colleague and she must have called someone. But I don't recall anyone coming. Not a doctor, not an ambulance, not a soul. For awhile. That's how Sunday mornings are at such places--skeleton crew! Somehow it was up to me to pack the body then and prepare it for removal from the premises. I was not unaccustomed to dead bodies, having worked in hospitals since I was 13, and I had dealt with some aspects of being there when death came, or in the morgue thereafter. Whatever, it had never been my task heretofore to stuff cotton into body cavities to keep "things" from coming out. Well, that was then and this was now. So I stuffed my first body. But that's not the weird part.

It didn't get a little surreal until "they" came to pick up the body and take it to the Elgin State Hospital Morgue. I was told I got the honor of accompanying the body there to protect it. The driver, a cordial old man, and two more trusted male patients showed up to get us. Ok, I got in the dated ambulance/hearse with the body bag and the 3 men. The morning was still fresh and achingly gorgeous, birds were gaily singing, and the total disconnect from reality came as we disembarked from the vehicle and the driver unlocked the door to the vacant building.

The sunshine behind my back evaporated as the door was locked from the inside so we would have no interference as we completed our mission. As we started down that stairs to the dark basement morgue, it grabbed me that here I was, a little teeny bopper, with 3 strange men- possibly VERY STRANGE- and I was protecting a female corpse from necrophilia, or molestation, or just improper stares.  "But who's going to protect me?" something inside me wailed.   I was going down, down, down into the bowels of an empty building surrounded by other empty buildings, no human beings around who could even begin to hear a scream, and I knew I was at the mercy of 3 large and possibly disturbed adult males.

They deposited the body without incident and moved away. One of the guys grinned at me sideways and then---suddenly!  Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch.... Ok, not exactly. But it was a little hard for me to breathe easily till we got to the top of the stairs and he unlocked the door so we could emerge into that welcoming sunshine again. No harm done. To anyone, dead or alive. By the time we got back to my Ward and they dropped me off, I may even have had a regular pulse. Heck, it didn't matter, I was just grateful to have a pulse!

So I'm older and wiser now, and if I'm ever in that situation again, I'm going to insist we draw straws to see who the body escort is. And if I get the short one, I'm not gonna play.