note to clinicians

If your patient dies on Monday and you want an autopsy on them, please do not:
* Bring the body into the morgue at 2 p.m. Wednesday (we get there at 8 a.m. every morning, and the daily "cutoff" for autopsies is 3 p.m.)
* Not mention anything to any of the pathologists or the pathology assistants
* Leave the chart on the gurney with the body, instead of on the computer desk where it's supposed to be (so we can spot it and go, "Oh! We have an autopsy.")
* Call the funeral home and tell them to go pick up the body, seeing as how you haven't told the people performing the autopsy they even have an autopsy to do

I found out about this case because I went into the morgue to use the restroom and spotted an extra sheet of paper tacked to the door of the refrigerator where they store the bodies. Finding my attending and PA at 2 p.m. the day before Thanksgiving was hard enough, but the clinical attending and resident were both off-service (again, the patient died 2 days ago). I managed to hunt the attending down. The funeral home folks showed up, to our surprise, before we even started cutting the body; if they had shown up before nature had called me, they might well have just wheeled off the body before we became aware of the autopsy.

Usually, the system works pretty well, but every now and then ... sheesh. The body was kept mechanically alive for two days in order to harvest organs, but if they knew on Monday they wanted an autopsy done Wednesday, a phone call would have been nice. On top of it all, they already knew how the patient died; they were just curious about one of the patient's organs and decided to have us plunge in. We can't say no. And we don't get paid for it.