I See Dead People

While the Whoop is dying down and winding up and all there is, is a distant coarse bark in the distance, I get a call from headquarters. All that needs to be done in Mississippi is done. The rest of the work can be (and is usually) finished back in Atlanta. There was another more pressing issue that needed to be addressed: the very Top Secret task of investigating an outbreak of pharmaceutical related deaths.

My secret agent services were once again in demand.

So, I make it back to Atlanta, laundered my underwear, and on Labor Day, swiveled back to the airport, once again outbound, traveling on government business.

Yes, there is a DEATH outbreak in West Virginia (you heard right) and I get to go find out why a subset of West Virginians have inadvertently decided to end their lives by O.D'ing on prescription medications.

Reporter: “As a spokesperson for the CDC, can you describe the case we have here?”
Me: “We seem to have a case of bonafide Death in West Virginia, Death of the truly moronic kind.”
Reporter: “Is it contagious, can we catch Death?”
Me: “Yes, unfortunately, you can, especially if your mother or father or friend had caught it first. What do you expect when you marry your first cousins and are related to your uncle by marriage?”

I should never be allowed to speak on behalf of the CDC. Thank goodness I am just small fry.

Here is a story of how one catches Death…

Nestled in the valley, surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains(and no, John Denver was not making it up), was the Medical Examiner’s office, which happened to be on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. Here, things are more run down and Starbucks is nowhere to be found. The nearby Kroger’s (grocery chain) doesn’t carry any ethnic food in their freezer section and I’m the closest thing to tiki paneer in a 100-mile radius. Charleston, the capital of WV, has the feel of Julesburg, Colorado. Things go to sleep past 5 pm and you will find no one walking around after eight. It is hard to believe that 3 million people live in WV.

I am thankful my urge for adventure was chained up somewhere between Atlanta, Georgia and Philadelphia, Mississippi. I ventured as far as the downtown corner, quaint bookstore. I really wanted to snoop around the middle-eastern café/grocery store one block from the coffee shop because I was thinking about stuffed grape leaves, but decided that prudence was the better entity to seek advice from, rather than my hunger. It was only 6 in the evening and although not totally deserted, Charleston still had some unsavory characters floating around. Or was it just my prejudice forming as a result of being surrounded by know-it-alls who constantly pigeon-hole people in order to better characterize them and predict their behaviors?

The M.E.’s compound was forged like Fort Knox. You needed a badge to get in and a badge to get out. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire. There were security cameras everywhere.

These folks are dead, people. But I guess the dead have the right to have their organs secured lest some desperate folks attempt to separate them from their owners and sell them on the black market to earn a quick buck.
This is the right neighborhood for that.
Macabre.
I suppose it is also for the safety of the very few people alive past 5 pm who are on call to receive the dead.

Our first task was to go through a huge book the people at the ME’s office call ‘The Bible’, filled with names of people who have met their last obligations on earth, to obtain their death certificate numbers. There were pages and pages of names and pages and pages more catching the Death from an overdose of prescription medications.

Peter Steeley, DC #06-092
Oh, Peter is sure steely now.

Cycy-Jo Sparks, DC #06-153
Cycy-Jo is enjoying the sparks down below.

Daniel Bob Baker, DC #06-1046
Poor Dan Baker baked his last batch of cookies.

Billyjo Bob Flowers DC # 06-054
Billyjo Bob ain't planting no flowers no more.

I couldn’t help but have a little fun. What’s life when you can’t have a little fun with death? As we plough on and we are actually reading the ME's autopsy reports along with the death investigator reports (real-life CSI people!), I am getting the sense that the majority of these folks 1) like their drugs and 2) are not the brightest tool in the shed.

Case in point: obese guy does a little cocaine and then proceeds to inhale (the fancy stancy word for this is insufflate: learn something new everyday) crushed tablets of methadone (morphine-like pain medication often used to curb heroin addiction) and for good measure, drinks a few cans of beer. He was found with a sandwich in his mouth a couple of days later when people got concerned that he hadn't shown up for work in a while.

45-year-old woman lies down for the night after taking some morphine tablets, a sprinkling of Xanax (sleeping pills) and a handful of antidepressants and washes it all down with some whisky.

32-year-old with sleep apnea (person who is obese and occasionally stops breathing at night while sleeping) snorts some methadone, takes a couple of Lortabs (morphine-like pain medication) at 8 pm, is found to be barely breathing with a weak pulse and unarousable by boyfriend at midnight, who proceeds to prop his girlfriend up on the bed, places a cold towel on her forehead, and then videotapes her snoring after which he promptly goes to sleep to wake up next to a cold body the next day. He videotapes her so he can prove he did something before she died?!

40-year-old man is home alone for the week because his wife is on a business trip, lays down on his recliner, drinks a couple of beers, takes a handful of methadone and some sleeping pills and goes to sleep permanently while watching the Golf Channel (frankly, I could have told him that you can fall asleep while watching the Golf Channel without sleep aids). His wife finds him on her return home. She had no notion that her husband used any drugs.

35-year-old father of three had gone into his son's medicine cabinet and took all of the Xanax pills the son had been prescribed the day before, had two days earlier, snorted some cocaine with his other son, is found stone cold in the morning by his wife. Their third son had died of an O.D. a year prior. A family that shares drugs together, stays together.

And my all-time favorite: 50-year-old hears some gurgling sounds coming from her roommate's locked door and assumes it was the pigeons outside, goes to bed for the night and had to call 911 in the morning. They found fatal levels of sleeping pills and pain pills in the roommate's system. Apparently, the sleeping pills weren't new for the roommate and she took one too many for the last time. Seriously, gurgling pigeons??

Hindsight is 20/20. I would be willing to bet that if these people had the ability to see back to what they were doing, they all would be saying to themselves: What was I thinking? Unfortunately, none of them could see past their 20 Xanax pills and 20 more methadone pills they were adding to their system on top of the cocaine and booze.

I'll be enrolling these folks for the Darwin Awards next year.

It is past 6 pm on our first day at the M.E.'s office. It is getting dark outside and the place is deserted, most of the staff having left at 5 pm (government workers). It had been fun glimpsing into these last moments of peoples' secret lives.

And then we hear a loud thud from upstairs. Was it a body that had fallen off its gurney?

**Note: The names of the decedents are real and fictional at the same time and the DC numbers are real and made-up as well, so if you're hoping to find a Cycy Sparks with that particular DC #, you'll be out of luck.