The worst thing I ever saw was when I was working as a scrub tech in labor-and-delivery at Woman's hospital. A woman gave birth to an anencephalic baby, it was fine during pregnancy and labor, but when it came out the "birth canal," the head was squshed and the first thing out of the vagina was eyes. Surprised the hell out of everyone, especially since this was before ultrasound. Particularly freaky to me because it was about 2:30 a.m., and I had been dozing. The dad wanted to look at it, the doctors did not want him to, I don't know how that came out. This was in the days before husbands in the labor room. (I only saw two "natural" births, one of them a Lamaze instructors, the other a German midwife).
The second worst I ever saw was a dead baby being born, everyone knew the baby was dead at least a couple of days before the woman was induced into labor, and when it was born the skin had come off as if it were scalded, and it smelled rotten. I can't imagine carrying a corpse voluntarily, I mean in my uterus.
I had to wrap it up, and carry it to the pathology lab, where I saw the third worst thing I ever saw, big jars full of aborted fetuses (spontaneous abortions) in formaldehyde, but the worst thing was that the black fetuses and the white fetuses were in different jars.
The first corpse I ever saw, I was in kindergarten, in the Garden District in New Orleans, and I saw a black man lying on the sidewalk in front of a bar. He was covered by a sheet, but I could see some of his body, and it was gray and ashy. The other kids said he was cut with a razor for cheating in a card game. This was something that did not cause me any pain, and does not rank among the worst things I have seen.
Enough? |
