"Let's Go Corpsin'!"

“A morgue or mortuary is a building or room (as in a hospital) used for the storage of human remains awaiting identification, or removal for autopsy, burial, cremation or some other post-death ritual. They are usually refrigerated to avoid decomposition.”

I used to work at UCLA Medical Center moving corpses. No, that’s not all I did there, but its one of the strangest things I have ever been paid to do besides working at the porn shop. I was a Patient Escort, a name that sounds sexy, like if someone was in a lot of pain we would “relieve” them or something. No. We pushed people around.

I used to always wait for the day that a body would twitch or move or something. I would hurry up and do morgue calls really fast in case after a certain amount of time they would start twitching or some shit. It never happened but that never stopped other crazy crap from happening.

The best example of my job and the ineptitude of my supervisors was this one call I had to do. We were supposed to take this lady from the ICU to a Cat Scan. We showed up with a wheelchair and an oxygen tank. Now, I knew this was a bad start since I knew who this patient was and knew she could not be moved from her bed. But no one likes to listen to reason. So we get there and tell a nurse that we’re here to take the patient to get scanned.

“Oh” she said. “She passed Sunday.”

It was Tuesday.

How To Transport A Corpse

1. You get the call telling you where the body is and hopefully who will be helping you get it.

2. Contact your partner and figure out who is getting the morgue gurney. May not sound bad but there were only three gurneys there and two of them didn’t work.

3. Once you had the gurney you had to take one of the tiny ass elevators. You had to actually tilt the gurney to make it fit and pray that no one else needed to use the elevator. 9 out of 10 times someone did.

4. From there you’d take another elevator to get to the floor you needed. The entire time you’re trying to not look like you’re doing what you’re doing. Looking for a corpse. Its funny, but Latin families always crossed themselves when they saw it. There wasn’t a body on it yet but you couldn’t tell by the way it was made. It had a huge, white, holy sheet draped over it.

5. Once you found the room and hopefully not the family we would let a nurse know we were there. Its funny how we treat the dead in America. Even if the nurse was just talking to the patient an hour ago once they became a corpse they wanted nothing to do with them. We get our paperwork signed and then get to work.

6. Taking a sheet we'd roll the body up like a giant joint. Tight at the head and feet. Then we’d lift it onto the gurney and throw the cover back on. Imagine pushing an ironing board with wheels.

7. Now is where I start moving as fast as possible. I don’t wanna experience the twitching or farting that corpses tend to do. We’d take the elevators back down and head to the morgue.

8. Once in the morgue and signing in who we were dropping off we’d open the morgue up and see what we had to deal with. Some lazy ass escorts would just leave a body on the gurney for someone else to deal with. Or worse, the morgue would be so full of bodies that you’d have to start double stacking.

9. No matter how small someone is once they are dead they’re heavy as hell! I still don’t get it. We’d shove the body onto the giant bunk bed type slabs and then lock everything back up.

10. Wash up and pray that you didn’t have another morgue call for the rest of the day.

Now, that was a best case scenario. Sometimes the family wanted to stay with the body longer after you had spent half an hour just getting there. Sometimes a nurse wouldn’t have the body wrapped and you’d walk in and see a body staring at you. There was one in the ER I had to get and dude had just died less than 10 minutes ago. Another time the family didn’t want the body wrapped because it was against their religion. That was a long call.

Another time we had to grab a kid from the ICU and take them to the morgue. Now, with taking a kid to the morgue the best case scenario was that the family had already cried and moved on. This was the case. Now, this one was my first morgue call and I had to do it with this dumbass kid that was employed just because his mom worked there. We went through all the wrong doors. Made wrong turns. It sucked. We got there and the body was wrapped (something that isn’t always the case like I said) and rushed him downstairs.

Whenever I hear people at job interviews ask me about stress and how I work under it, I laugh on the inside. I moved corpses. Dealing with a bitchy client or a boss that needs things fast is nothing to me. I always said when I first worked there that I wouldn’t touch a dead body but that call with the kid happened less than two weeks into my training. Once you pop that cherry it does get easier. Sadly. So the next time you have a hard day at work just say to yourself: “At least I don’t have to move a dead body.”

Rockets.