As Overdose Deaths Pile Up, a Medical Examiner Quits the Morgue

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/us/drug-overdose-medical-examiner.html

“It makes me feel like my hair is on fire, and I don’t even have hair,” Dr. Andrew said of the threat of increasingly potent drugs. “We’re already so far behind the eight-ball here, if we have an influx of carfentanil in this state, heaven help us.”

Back in the morgue, Dr. Andrew said he had learned to cope in this job, and its full immersion in death, by compartmentalizing what he sees and “locking it away.”

Every day, he said, a pathologist faces the fleeting nature of mortality. The people on his examining table could have lived a lot longer “but for a few millimeters of cholesterol in the wrong blood vessel, a second of inattention by the driver of a car or the lethal potency of a drug obtained on the street.”

And after a while, he said, one is bound to ask, “What’s all this about?”

His plan is to become an ordained deacon in the United Methodist Church, with two goals: to serve as a chaplain for the Boy Scouts of America, and to join the Appalachian Trail Chaplaincy of the United Methodist Church so he can minister to troubled hikers, at least on the 161 miles of the storied trail that cross New Hampshire and its White Mountains.

Dr. Andrew said he developed an appreciation for the essence of life by seeing its fragility. Most of the nearly 5,800 people he has examined on his stainless steel autopsy table, he said, “woke the day they died oblivious to the fact that it would be their last on earth.”