Unnatural Causes

by Dr Richard Shepherd

Maybe I did need to discuss this with a professional after all. A priest, perhaps? Some person, anyway, whose job it is to receive our weaknesses and offer us strength.

How amazing is this sentence! I find that is the perfect explanation for seeking help for any mental health issue.

Perhaps I wanted to view that horrifying thing, the worst that could happen, that thing called death, through the detached, clinical, analytical eyes of the great Simpson.

Pathology was interesting but forensic pathology was medicine and then some.

At that moment, I wondered if I didn’t have more in common with a homicidal maniac than a doctor.

Sometimes my interest in forensic pathology as a career path does spark this question in me...

I began by explaining that death is a process. And when that process, dying, is complete, it sets off another series of processes which eventually return us to the earth and complete the life cycle.

I bothered with sixteen years of training when all I needed to do was buy a medical dictionary or learn how to Google.

Sometimes this is how it feels when people (outside medicine) try to explain medicine to you, a doctor (in training)

Forensic pathology was a service, but no longer the intellectually rigorous world I had entered, with its scope for debate, study and social change.

The loss of my ability to rest was soon followed by the loss of my ability to read. Because I couldn’t make the decision to pick up a book, or to open it. I couldn’t make any decision at all. Would I like a cup of tea? I had no idea. I barely knew whether to get up in the morning, let alone bother to get dressed. The future? It didn’t exist.

This feels like a line I could have written if I was good at writing down my feelings or thoughts.

My PTSD is not caused by any particular one of the 23,000 bodies on which I have performed post-mortems. And it is not caused by all of them. It is not caused by any particular disaster I have been involved in clearing up. And it is not caused by all of them. It is caused, in its entirety, by a lifetime of bearing first-hand witness to, on behalf of everyone – courts, relatives, public, society – man’s inhumanity to man.

Just wow...Thank you for your honesty Dr. Shepard.

Cured is not, unfortunately, a word in the PTSD lexicon. But that glimpse of a world without sickness – it must have lasted two, maybe three hours – was enough to make me long for more, to give me the energy to reach for more. The next intimation of normality would last longer. Eventually, one lasted a whole day. Gradually the world of colour and beauty began to reform itself around me, like a jigsaw.

‘Got a very strange case for you today, looking forward to seeing what you make of it.’ A very strange case, eh? It must have been those words that propelled me forward.

The beauty of loving what you do, right here... this is how it feels.

I cut along the bottom of the ribs and down the sides of the abdomen. Then I fold down the muscles of the abdominal wall, like opening the lid of a box.

My mentor also cuts his bodies like this... find it super efficient.