Busy Day for Elderly Pathologist

For a mostly retired pathologist I had a busy day.

First thing was a post-mortem examination on a 40 year old male who didn’t wake up yesterday morning. Now that I think about it, with the amount of skin slippage that he had, it was probably at least 3 or 4 days ago that he didn’t wake up. He had a heart large enough to do him in.

Then I hurried to St Pius for a funeral mass for the wife of a retired surgeon. Apparently she just up and died one evening a few days ago. Another reminder that we need to treasure all our gatherings as they may be cut short at any time, so always say what needs to be said, just in case one or the other of us doesn’t wake up.

A quick lunch at home, then off to First Presbyterian where we celebrated the life of Bob W., president of the Billings Mustangs for quite a few years, and a good guy. He was known to have some kind of heart disease and fairly severe Parkinson’s disease, but as bad luck would have it, he slipped and fell while shoveling snow on 1 January, broke his hip, and then took about a month to die.

Then back to the morgue to examine a month old male whose mother was in jail and was being looked after by his step-father: not a very auspicious start in life, and not surprisingly, he didn’t get very far either. He was filled with pus in all his airways and even in his urine. The “old man’s friend” can affect the very young too.

Standing out in my mind at the end of the day was the reading from Proverbs about the good wife at the morning funeral and the eulogy from an articulate 11 year old grandson at the afternoon funeral.

What has been offered for learning today? 1) Choose your ancestors wisely; and 2) Get somebody else to shovel your driveway.