Working Stiff Quotes

“Staying alive, as it turns out, is mostly common sense.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“There are no emergency autopsies,” another resident pointed out to me. “Your patients never complain. They don’t page you during dinner. And they’ll still be dead tomorrow.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses--not zebras.' In other words, most things are exactly what they seem, and the simplest answer is usually the right one.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Oh, yes—that thing about house cats is true. Your faithful golden retriever might sit next to your dead body for days, starving, but the tabby won’t. Your pet cat will eat you right away, with no qualms at all. Like any opportunistic scavenger, it will start with your eyeballs and lips.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“To confront death every day, to see it yourself, you have to love the living.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Don't deny reality for the sake of objectivity.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Opening Yulia Koroleva's uterus was the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever done. When I saw that perfect fetus, when I took it in my hands, my vision clouded over with tears and my professional reserve fell away...[he] had fully formed organs each in its correct location, without any abnormalities. The foot length told me he had been nineteen weeks old, exactly halfway through gestation. I returned him to his mother's body, to be buried with her.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Now I found myself at a windy crime scene in the middle of Manhattan rush hour, gore on the sidewalk, blue lights and yellow tape, a crowd of gawkers, grim cops, and coworkers who kept using the word “clusterfuck.” I was hooked.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“I enjoyed the intellectual rigor and scientific challenge of death investigation. Everyone there, from new students to the most senior doctors, seemed happy, eager to learn, and professionally challenged. None of the medical examiners had cots in their offices. “There are no emergency autopsies,” another resident pointed out to me. “Your patients never complain. They don’t page you during dinner. And they’ll still be dead tomorrow.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“During the last shift, an X-ray had revealed a woman’s severed hand, complete with wedding ring, entirely embedded inside the chest wall of a man’s intact torso.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Remember: This can only end badly.” That’s what my husband says anytime I start a story. He’s right. So.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“(I)f you try to treat the medical problem you *think* you see without fully exploring the differential diagnosis -- call(ed) "speculation on a foundation of assumption" -- you can kill your patient.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Everyone thinks “murder” when you say you work as a medical examiner, but homicides are rare. “Natural” is the most common manner of death and represents about a third of the cases that come to a medical examiner’s office.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“During my two years training as a medical examiner in New York City, I was quick to learn that there is no such thing as a 'minor' surgery.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Maybe nobody cares about you when you are alive, but lots of people take an interest once you are dead.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“There is not such thing as "minor" surgery. Minor surgery is surgery someone else has.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Let conversation cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where Death delights to help the living.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Oh, yes—that thing about house cats is true. Your faithful golden retriever might sit next to your dead body for days, starving, but the tabby won’t. Your pet cat will eat you right away, with no qualms at all. Like any opportunistic scavenger, it will start with your eyeballs and lips. I’ve seen the result.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“I had a wonderful rejuvenating half-hour massage before going backt to work. "You"re under a lot of stress because your chakras are way out of whack," the pleasant young masseuse informed me.
That, and I'm working a graveyard shift sifting through fetid human remains under Frankenstein conditions, I thought privately. That, and the chakras.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“The outer layer of epidermis slid off in my hand like the rind of a rotten fruit.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Guns leave distinct types of wounds at different ranges. A contact wound, with the gun touching or pressed into the skin, can sear a round scorch mark called a muzzle stamp.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“A year after the event, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner had issued 2,733 death certificates for the victims of the World Trade Center bombings—1,344 by judicial decree and 1,389 based on identified remains. The count of Members of the Service confirmed dead was 343 firefighters, 23 NYPD officers, and 48 others, most of these Port Authority police. The dead left more than 3,000 orphans. It was the largest mass murder in United States history.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“of the remains you receive will be affected by this change.” Hirsch also revealed that our legal team had assembled a plan to issue death certificates for victims of the attacks based on two affidavits—one from the family and one from the employer of the missing person. “There will certainly be some victims who will never be positively identified, even by DNA,” he said. In those cases, the legal requirement for a death certificate would have to be met through sworn testimony of the people who last saw or heard from the vanished persons. “We will link the cases electronically once, and if, DNA or some other method identifies a missing person who has been issued a death certificate by judicial decree.” Dr. Hirsch finished his presentation that”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“The toxicology report on Bobby Ward took four months to reach my desk. During those four months, Mrs. Ward called me twice a week or more. Some weeks she called every single day. She had many theories about Bobby’s death, none of them involving drugs. “He didn’t use drugs,” she kept insisting, despite my telling her, every time we spoke, that the physical findings I saw on the autopsy pointed, strongly, to an overdose. “What about the sushi?” she asked me during one call. “People die from bad sushi all the time. He had sushi that day. Did you test the sushi in his stomach?” I tried to assert my firm professional opinion that people do not die from bad sushi all the time. In my experience people never die from bad sushi. A huge load of heroin, yes; bad sushi, no. “What about the beer? He was drinking beer with the sushi—it could have been poisonous. Maybe the beer made the bad sushi more dangerous!” Most every day for four months Mrs. Ward had a new theory of what did Bobby in: misuse of a friend’s asthma medication, anthrax (he’d died around the time of the October 2001 anthrax-letters terrorist attacks, so this was a hot topic at the time), allergic alveolitis, dust mites, iterations of the bad sushi theory over and over again. Then, just after Christmas, the toxicology report finally arrived. It showed Robert Ward had taken a lethal concoction of heroin, cocaine, and the tranquilizer diazepam.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Every doctor has to cultivate compassion, to learn it and then practice it. To confront death every day, to see it for yourself, you have to love the living.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Ghosts had followed me back from the Pile. I searched the posters for their faces.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“there is no such thing as “minor” surgery.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Doing autopsies for a living did not make me afraid of the world—but I was being haunted by ghosts who weren’t dead yet.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“Though I understand in the most intimate and clinical way how my father died, I will never know why. It’s a goddamned selfish act, suicide, if you ask me.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner