Finding a dead body

something daft already!!

something daft already!!

something daft already!!

Soldato
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This is more of a "I need to get this off my chest" type of thing. Please feel free to ignore or delete if not appropriate.

Well yesterday didn't quite work out as expected. I was visiting my partner and we get a knock on the door. It was the lady from downstairs and a another man who lives in a different flat there. They say they have not seen the guy who lives opposite my partner for a few days and he's usually about. His cars are outside, he has 2 of them. He has lived there for around 15 years and is friendly, if a slightly odd sort of chap. We knock on his door, there is no answer. I try the door handle. The door is unlocked. I step inside the darkened hallway and there is a slightly musty smell in the air. It is very quiet and darkened within. I walk down the short hallway. Then I see him. To my left, there in an open doorway. He is lying on his back on the floor, eyes closed, mouth open. White as a sheet and cold to the touch.

We both leave and I call 999 and ask for an ambulance. They kind of expect me to perform some sort of CPR but they poor chap has been dead for a couple of days. I'm not going to be doing that. A little while later, an ambulance and police car arrive. We talked to the police about it for a little while and then later a black van arrives and takes the body away.

A sobering evening and it has made me think about my own health. He isn't much older than I and has lived a more unhealthy lifestyle but I am feeling very mortal right now and carefully thinking about the future and how I live life from now.

Anyone else had a similar experience?
 
I found my neighbour dead a few weeks ago, no pulse, cold, not breathing and rang 999 and yeah again they expected me to perform CPR! I was like ‘what on a corpse’? The operator said ‘I’ll talk you through it and I pulled her onto her back and she clearly had rigor mortis and on explaining that she said I didn’t have to go through with it.
 
Yes, sadly a tenant in a flat died, in a heatwave, with a 3 kW fan heater on as well. He'd been dead in his bed for about three weeks.

At the time I had a workshop at the rear of the property and had been doing yet another favour on a friend's car. He came to pick it up and asked if there was anything he could do in return.

I suggested he helped bring a mattress, curtains and carpet down stairs. After being sick three times and looking like he might pass out, he left. Had to get my old dad to help. He was made of sterner stuff, never flinched and we just got on with it.


If you've ever seen a body that has vented and on the way to what undertakers call "a soup", you'll know dealing with the aftermath is not for the squeamish :( The bed, carpet and curtains needed burning, the floorboards bleaching and the room including the ceiling redecorating. A woman in a flat on the same floor left shortly afterwards citing nightmares.


Even the young copper who turned up fresh from wherever young coppers come from threw up, poor lad....

Makes me laugh when I read the landlords thread about how easy it all is.
 
The worst one I saw was back in saffrica, I used to cycle past the same retail park every day to and from school, was always dead as a doornail, a few parked cars in the lot and that was it. Until one day I cycled past and saw a crowd in the parking lot so went to see what was going on, as I got a clear line of sight I saw a few coppers pulling a corpse from the boot of a car. This was just after 1994 so these were brand new, fresh, untrained coppers who had no idea of protocol so there was no body bag, no cordon, nothing. Literally just a few blokes pulling a corpse from a car and leaving it on the ground whilst waiting for an ambulance.

Turns out this bloke was missing for three weeks and the only reason anyone found him was because of people complaining about the smell. It was his own car too. The only other time I smelled something that bad was when I went to the Vulture's Restaurant in the kruger park, where they brought all the dead animals for the vultures to eat. Cracking school tour that was.

Ah yes, good old saffrica.
 
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Imagine that would stay with you, I've never seen a dead body in real life especially not in circumstances like that. Guess it's natural to think about mortality in general and your own health & life when things like that happen - even though I didn't see them, when family members have died in the past it's prompted me to think about things like that.

Closest I've come to that kind of thing is maybe a couple of years ago when a neighbour knocked on having noticed my next door neighbour (an old man) had left milk outside for a couple of days and they hadn't seen him... asked around a bit and no one else had either, eventually an off duty copper from up the road climbed into his back garden and went in through an unlocked back door. He found him alive naked on the floor in the bathroom having fallen over or had some kind of medical episode some number of days ago. The copper opened the door and I went up with him to decide whether to try moving him or not & as I was a first aider (left in place for paramedics in the end as didn't know what injuries might have had, plus 999 advised) and started clearing stuff out of the way (the guy was a bit of a hoarder so there was rubbish just everywhere and we needed to clear a path so he could be taken downstairs when the ambulance arrived). Firemen turned up after about 20 mins and took over clearing a path, ambulance came a bit later and took him off to hospital. He came back home after a couple of months and is still living next door now (gets a cleaner / helper in a couple of times a week now), but really was a sobering incident, made me think about mortality, plus relationships with my family etc.
 
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Was taking a time lapse video of a pond in Epping Forest only to find out that a missing boy was dead under the water during that time. Being little pond it wasn't exactly crystal clear. I called the police to offer them up the hundreds of wide angle photos, person on the phone sounded uninterested and kept asking where and what, i told them it had been on national news for a while now (prior to the body being found) and just insert Epping Forest into Google search to see the top results. I also logged it online incase it somehow got lost in the 'system' by the operator. Was alittle grim thinking back on it, poor lad.
 
I guess young people today rarely see death first hand, off the top of my head I have seen my late grandmother, my late father and mother and my late father in law actually die, and identified the body of the father of an old girlfriend who'd been in a dramatic car accident, and had to pick up a document from the offiice of a shotgun suicide whilst the undertaker was removing the corpse. He saw me looking at the ceiling and just laughed as he said "Yes son, they're teeth". I vowed to use an overdose if I ever wanted a quick exit...

I'm probably some sort of harbinger of doom :)
 
I'm an emergency services worker so have dealt with a fair few dead bodies during my time. Never pleasant. Had one once where the deceased's pet dog had likely had a nibble on his former owner, that one was especially bad and had been there for quite some time, during a hot spell. The undertaker threw up on the driveway outside after moving that one.

Another, I've had to discretely tell the undertakers they should probably bring a bucket and spade, such was the level of decomposition and spillage from the abdomen area of the deceased, due to the position they had fallen in. Several times, I have to chose to keep family members out of a room until the deceased could be moved or covered up to provide some level of dignity to them, before letting family members see the deceased. Learning of the death of a loved one is never easy, but there's little dignity in death and sometimes the condition in which bodies are found is likely to add to the trauma of a bereavement.

It is something you get used to, after a while, the smell is something you will always recognise. I've forced entry to properties by smashing the front door in, and the smell has hit me, and I've known instantly that somewhere within the property, there was going to be a corpse.

The CPR advice you get from police or emergency call handlers is pretty standard, until a paramedic or other suitably qualified or trained person has pronounced life extinct, they will always work on the basis that, there is a chance of resuscitation. I've gone to some jobs though, where its immediately obvious that it would be completely pointless.

People have said to me, 'how do you do it?', and its just something that you become accustomed to, as unpleasant as it can be. And as I have heard some people say, in my line of work, the dead are no threat to me, its the live ones to worry about.
 
Found x2 prisoners who had hung themselves (separate incidents few years apart,) we tried to resuscitate them but sadly was unsuccessful both times.

Nothing can prepare you for it.
 
I used to have an old girlfriend who was terrified of cemeteries, genuinely scared witless by them, especially in the dark. Never could understand that, the ones inside can't get out, and the ones outside sure as hell don't want to get in too soon....
 
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Sadly working for the NHS I see too many, something over the last 13 years I have just got used to and I have seen some horrible ones. As sad as it sounds you just switch of when your dealing with it.
 
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Few months ago, my Dad had a massive brain bleed and was put into palliative care as there was nothing they could do... they expected him to pass in a few days, he lasted 9 days before his heart gave out. Me and my family stayed with him the entire time in shifts to make sure someone was there at all times in case he had any kind of awareness (the care "cocktail" they give people doesn't knock them out, just relieves pain and has anti anxiety drugs so no way of knowing how aware they are).
Was very sobering when he took his last breath, especially how quickly he changed in the hour or two after (the doctor gave us some time to allow missing family to come in and say goodbye before he did the sign off).
You are right, it is very surreal and makes you question things, but it has also been quite weird to see (for me personally) how quicky my mind has made it feel like some old memory from years ago even though it was only in March. Funny thing death, I certainly couldn't be around it a lot like some of people posting above.... a lot of respect for people working in those industries.
 
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