Five Things I Learned Moving Dead Bodies

Years ago I worked at a hospital as a patient escort. When people would ask me what the job was I would just say “I move people.” I also say that the job does not exist on television. When someone is brought to a hospital on TV and movies you see every doctor that will be doing the operation or whatnot grab a side of the gurney, shout things, rush into a room, and get to work. That is not what happens. The job was way more than that though. I would get a call when someone arrived, told where to take them, do that, and then the slow process of getting someone into a room or whatever would begin.

Besides moving people around I would pick up equipment and take people to places using a wheelchair, their bed, or gurneys. And sometimes I'd have to take dead people to the morgue. There were rarely good days at the hospital but good days included not having to move a dead body. Those days sucked. In this post I am gonna talk about the Five Things I Learned Moving Dead Bodies. If you are a sensitive mortal you probably should not read this because I'll be talking about moving dead folks. Everyone else continue reading this and never ask me why I won't work at a hospital again.

The First Is The Worst...Sometimes

When I moved my first dead body I was pissed off for multiple reasons. The guy I had to do it with, the fact that it was a kid, and that I had said when I found out that this was a part of my job that I would never do it. I didn't know how but I told myself that I'd find a way to never have to move a corpse in the time I worked in the hospital. Before this call I knew where the morgue was but did not go inside of it. I was about to get a full tour. The call came maybe half an hour before it was time for me to go home. This was during my first two weeks there and I hated the job. The best thing about it were the patients and when it was time to go I was super ready to go.

I was partnered up with this kid that was for lack of a better term, an idiot. Like, he was straight up stupid. We got the call and had to go get the morgue gurney. The morgue gurney looked like what it was. We headed to the kids floor and this was my second time being here. We were told the family had just left which I was very thankful about. I'll get to why later. So we get the body and immediately leave through a door setting off an alarm, get the gurney on the elevator wrong at an elevator that took five minutes (there is no private body elevator), and eventually got to the morgue which is a smell I shall never forget so that's cool. I thought this was bad but there would later be a call to get a body that was so bad it changed me as a human.

The Right Team Is Important

When you work with someone like that idiot above you realize that when you get a morgue call having the right person working with you is very important. When you get a call to get a body you are assigned to have two people handle it. Only twice did I have to do it alone. Someone gets the gurney, someone heads to where the body is, and if they are cool they give you a heads up like “The family is here” or “The body is not ready.” If the body is not ready that usually means that the nurse has not wrapped the body yet and you'll walk into the room with a corpse just staring at you. I'll get to the family stuff next.

On the worst call I ever had I got stuck with this kid that started after me at the job and he was absolute garbage. During the call he was being super verbal about the damage to the body to the point where this lady whose job it was to make the body semi-presentable to viewers had to pretty much tell him “Okay, we get it! It's bad!” He was slow to arrive to the call and I warned him that it was bad. He shows up dragging the gurney with one arm and talking to someone on his personal phone. He sucked and I bet he is still there. On a good call with a good employee the call only took as long as the elevator ride to drop the body off. Most calls were not good. On a scale of 1-10 most calls were 5's and 6's.

No Two Families React The Same

There have been calls where family or friends were still there and each time I would cringe. A lot of times I would know the person who had died because I'd taken them to a procedure and talked to them or took them to their room when they arrived at the hospital. So I would get to know them a bit which helped when a family member was very emotional like “Oh, you're her daughter. She said you were in school.” That type of thing. Then there were some families that would be straight up arguing with one another in the room with the body. These situations were how I got a reputation as being a “cooler.”

I'm not what you would describe as an emotional person. If I walk into a room full of screaming, anger, or sadness I will suck the energy right out of a room. With these families I would walk in, introduce myself, ask if anyone wanted to stay, and do my job calmly and quietly. There was one call where the patient was not close to being ready and these two ladies were in front of the room. They looked like twins and they said that they were the guys ex wives and that I should have seen the other one. “He has a type” they laughed. They wanted to wait until we got his body which was fine with me.

Expect Complications

Complications came often and when they did it usually had nothing to do with me and my coworkers. Usually. Sometimes it did like when my supervisor and I got a call to take a patient for a CT scan and I said “I know who this patient is and there is no way they are getting a CT scan.” He ignored me, grabbed a wheelchair and oxygen tank, and we arrived to the friggin' ICU where this patient was in no condition to breathe on his own let alone be tossed into a wheelchair, moved, propped onto a table, and taken back to their room. Sometimes the elevators never came. Sometimes you had to tilt a gurney with a body on it to get it to fit. Sometimes the morgue was too full.

My longest morgue call had to do with a patient that for some religious reason could not be placed in a body bag. I had been there for a few months at this point and I had lines. Lines that would not be crossed. Grabbing this old person by their still warm ankles and putting them on an uncovered gurney, parading them through the hospital, waiting for an elevator, and doing who knows what once we got to the morgue was a line. My supervisors did not know what to do and then this guy showed up from a mortuary looking every bit like someone from a mortuary. He had black gloves and everything and he helped move the body, unwrapped, and placed it on his special gurney. Maybe it was blessed or something. I don't know. All's I know is that it took almost an hour from start to finish.

You Get Used To It

I realized that I was too used to moving bodies when me and a former friend/coworker were talking about wrestling while moving someone who had died in an ICU. In less than a year I went from cringing just preparing to head to a room with a dead body to having casual conversations while moving a dead body. People talk about the humor that comes from doing “dark” jobs. We would never make jokes about the dead bodies but we would talk about everything but what we were doing because to do otherwise would be depressing as all hell.

As weird as it sounds I am glad that I had to do that for a job. It was something that pushed me right the fuck out of my comfort zone. Hell, right out of the comfort zone of most people alive. No one wants to touch anything that is dead and not covered in sauce. It made me appreciate being alive and able to watch a good movie and hang out with people I love more and not take so much shit for granted. Few things will remind you how easily this can end than having it right in your face on a daily basis. There were patients I would sit with while waiting for a doctor for way longer than I was supposed to and then a week later or sometimes the next day be taking them to the morgue. I'm not saying that you should appreciate life more because people die. But t appreciate life because this is a weird as existence that can be nice and fun if you find the right people to get through it with. Even if the hundreds of patients I talked to never remember my name they will remember that Black guy with the weird hair, spiked bracelets, crazy shoes, and loud laugh that made them smile for a few minutes in a place full of sickness.

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