WELL, there were a pair of thoraco-omphalopagus (chest and stomach) conjoined twin fetuses in a jar of what I could only guess is formalin although I don't remember smelling it (and formalin has a pretty fuckin memorable smell). Might have just been alcohol. They, too, were at around 18-24 weeks' gestation--and boy howdy, 18-24 weeks' gestation for a fetus is like 19-22 years old for a woman when it comes to "head games," heh--but I never touched them because I figured they'd probably fall apart or get even more disgusting or something. I took a picture of them and posted it in that old thread, but it was like 5 phones ago and they were probably uploaded to waffleimages or some other bullshit site that's gone now. I still have friends who work there and could take pics though, I'll just tell one of them I need to post a picture of the conjoined twins (and the human heart, and there was also some non-descript piece of white tissue that was probably a uterus or rectum or something horrible, idk not a doctor irl) for the internet and they'll understand. There were also the live tissue organs from autopsies, those were definitely in that awful smelling formalin crap in white plastic jars, not classy glass ones, and ranged from miscellaneous tissue bundles which I can only assume were sold as "mystery packages" at a discount, to lungs which are pretty easy to pick out because they float and look pretty spongy, to brains which are pretty fuckin hard to mistake for anything else because they're brains. I personally always pictured a "heart" as like the size of a softball or bigger, but they actually really are only about the size of a closed fist. The really wacky part is seeing the autopsy. I worked at some shitty regional hospital(s), the kind that get screwed by Mexicans without insurance using the ER as their own personal free GP, with weird religious restrictions that make them serve disgusting vegetarian shit-ass-awful imitation chicken in the cafeteria--not a big university medical center where people give a shit and are learning stuff or an OCME (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, aka "Coroner" in jurisdictions full of backwoods retards who don't appoint medical doctors to be in charge of their forensic medical investigations) where they do this shit all day every day for police/homeless person reasons. The autopsies at a poopy regional hospital on the verge of closing are just performed by a diener ("deener," a guy with a 2-year degree), who cuts out the organs, places them in white plastic jars of formalin presumably via slam dunk, and sends them in red biohazard bags to histology techs, who slice them up and make slides to send to pathologists, who take a break from Microsoft Solitaire, counting money, and checking out Fb pics of the sick vacation they took for the two years they weren't in residency while all the real doctors who see living people were, to look at them and say "no evidence of disease" for pretty much every organ and determine that the person died of heart disease, secondary to a bullet through the aorta, tertiary to the AIDS the deceased intentionally thrust into his abusive and vengeful lover's puckered anus. The autopsies I've seen were generally "limited" autopsies that were chest cavity only, and didn't require the little circular saw for the skull--actually if you've ever had a cast for a broken arm or leg or whatever, that saw they use is pretty much the same as the one they use to saw open your skull (and also amputate limbs etc). There's at least one video on YouTube of all this being done, probably the one striking thing is the way the blood just kinda pools in the bottom of the abdominal cavity like a big ol' stew, the other being that it's a dead person being hacked open and disemboweled I guess. Anyway, the first autopsy I saw, I come into the morgue--just an unmarked wooden door that's a little wider than the others, generally within a few feet of the cafeteria because the same type of refrigeration is required--and proceed to do my work (sex w/ corpses, yes) and cannot help but notice that all the lights are on in the autopsy room, there's the body of a 78 year old woman named Annie on the stainless steel table with the harsh school-picture-day lighting shining down on the splayed-open majesty of her digestive tract, and there's a black dude standing there writing something on a jar of, if the writing was any evidence, "HRT/LUNGS" as he enjoys the fresh tunes and hip beats of one of the more "urban" radio stations the metro area has to offer. My shock at the radio reception in the basement of the hospital gives way to shock at how the blood just kinda... sits in there... at which point the gentleman introduces himself as Dante or Dewante or something that basically sounds like "Satan" to me at this point, we fist-bump (this is common practice in the medical field where people are all wearing gloves and handling disgusting shit, as well as amongst cool, hip bros who are "down," such as myself), and he explains the preceding paragraph of this post to me. He shows me the hateful looking set of tools they use--unbeknownst to him, I had both seen and extensively dicked around with these rib shears/skull keys/butthole scissors or whatever already, but I feigned interest because he was kind of weird and had a scalpel with which he was gesticulating wildly. Pretty much everyone who works with corpses professionally is basically weird as shit, and I personally make it a point not to offend those among us that may very well eat things that they fuck, so we had quite a conversation, or at least as much of one as you can have with someone who either thinks you're a figment of his imagination or never talks to other human beings. My work completed, I went back up to the lab with my newfound Wikipedia-caliber combination of knowledge, misinformation and about 10 retarded minutes about souls living in light fixtures? surging through my veins, and into the break room to eat my dinner or whatever the hell meal you eat during the second shift. The breakroom had a window overlooking the parking lot that the ghetto backside of the hospital that patients don't see looks into, and I recognized a figure emerge from one of these windowless back doors, hunched over and carrying a Santa Claus-sized bundle of red biohazard bags over his shoulder. He turned, gazed knowingly at me with the blank expression and soulless, granite eyes of someone who voluntarily chooses a career in the illustrious field of disemboweling dead human beings, and waved to me. I nodded, returned his wave, and took the most savory bite of imitation chicken of my life. * * * * * * * * These are really funny puns about gamer tags. So as I stated earlier, people who voluntarily choose to work with dead bodies as their career tend to be weird as fuck. Weirdest of all are the funeral home transport people. They'd usually show up wearing suits, I'm not sure why you wear a suit into the basement of a hospital but I guess out of respect for the loading dock or something, and typically they drive either a hearse, duh, or equally likely, some kind of windowless Chevy utility van. You probably have passed a fucking million of them on the street. Most of the time they look like just your standard contractor van, white, red, gray, whatever color, tinted rear windows, but some of them have this telltale bumper like the back of an ambulance--this is to kick the legs on gurneys upwards as they load them onto the rails in the back. The anatomy board also carries a veritable ice cream truck worth of bodies in the back of a refrigerated truck, and once again you've probably seen a million of these unmarked trucks with your municipal or state government's seal on one of the front doors and thought nothing of the refrigeration unit over the cab or what may be inside; rest assured, it's either refrigerated school lunches, or slowly decomposing corpses of people who ended up at the anatomy board--some of them donated, some of them homeless with nobody, or, worst of all, some of them just shitty people whose undoubtedly equally shitty families want nothing to do with them even in death. Careful not to rear-end one, lol. Seriously though it'd probably be super disgusting, because they sit around in hospital morgues, sometimes the OCME and then the anatomy board for like months sometimes, and yeah keeping them refrigerated doesn't stop that whole "putrification" thing, just slows it down. So anyway, these people who do this crap for a living are fucking weird. One of them came into the morgue, he was probably like 20 and basically looked like Peewee Herman only decidedly more funerary, although he had the same gray suit, and asks for "Reynolds, J., Female age 43" Now this isn't my job, I'm in there on an unrelated matter with the guy from security who deals with this shit, so he goes in to retrieve "Reynolds, J." As Peewee makes this dark, grandiose gesture of opening the bag on his stretcher (the dude was like 20 and clearly thought what he was doing was badass), the security guy comes out holding a small, white, plastic jar. Heh. Yeah, the same jars they use for the brains and shit, they use smaller versions for the youngin's. Not the babies, those are just depressing as all hell, but the little tiny ones whose lives, many of us believe, and most state governments agree, have not yet begun. They also put the mother's wristband ID on the jars because well, babby isn't exactly a patient, he's viewed in a more "medical waste" context, and most of the medical waste shit (mostly amputated limbs, but also POC, i.e. Products of Conception, lil' aborted fetuses and the disgusting red soupy shit they float in) has to have someone's hospital ID on it in case it has to be sent to pathology or, you know, well some people like to have funerals for those. So my buddy in security just kinda hands Peewee the jar, and Peewee looks at it, a little confused despite his very dark, creepy demeanor, and thinks for a minute. Funeral homes have these full-sized gurneys/litters that aren't really like ambulance stretchers per se, they're completely flat and they don't have beds or cushioning because, lol, well that'd get pretty disgusting after a while (yes bodies do leak a little bit from those areas). The also have bodybags integrated into the frame somehow, and they come in all different colors and patterns, and it really makes you wonder who decides what color, material, and pattern they want on their fucking mortuary stretcher? Christ, I could go on about body bags but I think I'll save that for a different mind-numbingly stupid derail in this fucking thread during a slow day at work. So this guy thinks for a minute, then just sticks the jar on the stretcher, zips the bag up over it (clearly a bodybag with a jar in it), and trundles off in his oversized Peewee Herman suit and the shitty posture all of them have because they're wholly incapable of not being creepy as fuck in every single regard, never to be seen again. So one day, and the point of this story, there was one exception. This woman comes in, black woman, maybe mid-30's to 40's, dressed in nice clothes as always, and she's just as cordial and personable as can be. Real conversationalist, smiling, polite, just a regular woman. Today, we're retrieving the remains of a gal named Simmons. Well don't you know, Simmons is a big gal. Real fucking big, like 350 lbs. Probably why she's dead. So this woman asks me and my security buddy if we could help her out, since there's a ramp down the dock that they have to go down and she's concerned that the body will tip over/fall off. She voices this concern about three more times, leading us to believe it has happened before. So we're like sure, what the hell, it's the security guy's job anyway and I plan to someday make a post in a shitty Call of Duty thread about everything I learn from this shitty job on this shitty day, and we take Ms. Simmons and head down the concrete-floored corridor of broken hospital beds and dim theme park haunted house lighting, out to her waiting van. She opens it up, we push Ms. Simmons in there next to her riding companion, presumably from another hospital nearby... and that's when I spot the half-eaten bucket of KFC in the center console of the van. "Lunch time?" I ask her, as she comes around to the back. "Yeah," she exclaims with a huge smile on her face. "There's a KFC right next to the [funeral] home, I try not to pig out but today Jesus spoke to me and he said today you've earned it, it is a day to EAT!" "Ah," I reply, my eyes locked on the two bagged corpses resting about three inches from the half eaten drumstick in the KFC bucket as the telltale smell of piss and early decomposition flirted with my nostrils in the warm summer air, "...yeah, I like KFC too." "Well, thanks guys! God bless you," she says, as she shuts the door, my eyes still locked on the outline of the bodies through the nearly black tinted windows. As she drives off, I look up at the driver's side to see her taking another hungry bite of KFC. So yeah there aren't actually any exceptions, they're all fucking weird as shit. - Stubear St. Pierre, Something Awful Forums