BloodyKitten

I drove the "meat wagon" in my county for nearly two years, also under contract. Glancing through the list of questions, I have to laugh at what you could answer with.

Here's one for you. What was your worst decomp?

I'll share mine... streamline trailer (those rounded metal bubble looking ones), person missing in Feb, we were called in July. This is Florida, they were never frozen. They'd popped because of the small room size. Only decomp we were required to wear our biosuit for in my entire time there. We used a sheet to collect pieces, and dumped the remains in the bag. Took us a good hour to find the hand-skin for prints, it'd floated under the bed.

Oh, another question I'm curious about since different states. What are your bag colors? We used white bags for 'clean' and black for 'messy'.

One thing I still have is a piece of police line tape. My first 'pieces' was a cop's first 'pieces' so I traded a toe tag for a section of police line tape. From a hanging, I did take biological matter... guy had left a note for someone to adopt the kittens he left in his van, so I persuaded animal control to left me take the sole surviving one (the rest succumbed to heat stroke). I named him Grim.

Oh, and we once picked up a live guy. Ever had that one happen? Was a mental hospital, left bag on the gurney by the nurses station to seek out where the body was. Couldn't find anyone, and our gurney was in a room and loaded when we got back. We asked the nurse, who said she thought two orderlies took care of it. Do our paperwork and leave. About 5 minutes after we leave, dude knocks on the window to the cab with 'are we out yet'? I nearly shit myself, and my partner who was driving nearly crashed the van. I hopped on the radio, and we got turned around, real fast.

(Sorry, my friends are all girly girls who don't like to hear about my stories. I actually liked the job, just not the hours.)

I never had to deal with a hoarder decomp, and was lucky my heaviest was only 500lb on a day we had 2 trainees to help. All of our hoarders were at least fresh.

Ever play tricks on new people? We did... partial decomp, identity known (so we could get away with a little more), when we knew they had lost 'cohesion', we'd take trainees and let them try and lift by themselves. They'd do arms and legs... one guy had the forearm skin slough off, meat landing on the floor at his feet... he puked in his gas mask.

As per biosuits, I am in a city with a major military base. We were told they are only for 'unknown infectious status' and told we'd be billed to our paychecks if we ever used them without needing to. Company REALLY didn't like giving them to us, but the sheriff's office required us to have them. We didn't catch any shit for using them this time.

As per equipment, we ran a converted van-ambulance with yellow flashers (we didn't get to run code, except for 1 time the sheriff personally told us to haul ass since a news van saw a multiple fatalies crash occur), our bags were white (clean/fresh) or black (blood/decomp, hid the mess better) as I said, we had gas masks rated for ammonia (finer filter than bio, worked for both and kept out more smell) for decomps, regular 'surgeons masks' for normal day to day, sheets for picking up blobs (roll them to the side, sheet down, roll on, lift via sheet and put in bag), and went through boxes and boxes of nitrile gloves. In a locked cabinet (not easy to get to) were 2 positive pressure biosuits, in the cabinet next to them were the heavy ass backpacks that had the air tanks for them. Also, an old ambulance gurney which usually smelled of bleach.

Suits looks very much like this but had a backpack that looked like a small school pack, that had two tanks in it; one was 50% nitrox, the other was nitrogen.. and was a PITA to get going right so the suit inflated.

Honestly, if you can get past the whole 'dead body thing', it really is a fun job. You see a LOT of things you aren't going to see anywhere else. It's stinky, messy, and gory. You reek when you get home. Your back hurts like hell if you had a string of fat people. Lots of other little things.

..but..

In the end, not matter how bad your day is, and how horrible your 'customers' are, you can always tell them how horrible they are, and you always know they had it worse than you do, and they never complain to your supervisor.

If I could go back and work with a better schedule (those busy 168 hour weeks sucked), I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

People soup!

No. It is not an exaggeration. You run 12 hours on the clock, in the van (or cleaning it), and 12 hours on call.

During the 12 hours on call, there is another team running first-come calls. If a second call comes in before the first team has finished running, you're up. When that call arrives, you have 1 hour to be in uniform, in the van, with your partner, at the scene. Really sucked when it was a 40 minute drive across the county and it took you 20 minutes to get dressed and drive to the meeting point to join your partner.

During a holiday week, when a lot of people are drinking, you've got calls coming in from the hospices, hospitals, and so on like usual, as well as a lot of calls about drunks or their victims. I went 168 hours on about 4 hours sleep during that time, more than once. You get good at polyphasic sleep, it is the ONLY way to handle those weeks. Even then, you might miss sleep times due to calls.

Sleep deprivation was the cause of the reason I left.