Medical Examiners, what was the weirdest but completely plausible cause of death you have ever witnessed?
I'm not a medical examiner but I work at a cemetery and one of the strangest deaths was a 37 year old woman that was cooking over the stove.
She tripped over her dog while in the middle of boiling water and somehow the back of her head hit the kitchen towel holder on the oven and part of her long ponytail was laying on the stove burner.
Her hair caught on fire while she was unconscious and basically she burned to death in her kitchen.
Paramedic.
I went to an autopsy of a patient who died, back in the day we were actualy encouraged to go to those whenever we wanted.
The guy was going to back out of his driveway, but there was road construction and there was a metal framed sawhorse-style traffic barricade in the way.
He went to move it and apparently slipped, and the aluminum hinge hit him in the armpit.
The wound was not even an inch deep, severed an artery and he died right there.
Work in a pharmacy.
Some guy came in to refill his blood pressure meds, told him it would be 20 minutes.
He then starts saying he feels funny and is really short of breath.
A co worker walks with him to a chair in the waiting room, the guy puts his head back, pees/poops himself, then dies within five minutes.
Guy died having sex on a piano at a strip club.
It was a specially engineered piano that could be lowered from the second floor with the strippers posed on it.
This guy and his gal accidentally triggered the lift mechanism.
He was crushed to death by the ceiling.
She was trapped under his dead body for hours.
All night long, under his body, smooshed between him and the piano.
The janitor found her early the next morning.
It took 3 hours to extricate her from the mess.
Reference
I've got three stories for you.
I used to work in the office of medical examiners in a southwest state.
Blood clot - a man was found dead in his home, completely naked, with water all over the floor and no signs of blunt force trauma to the head or anywhere else for that matter.
The only other weird thing was there were water balloons in his freezer and defrosted on the kitchen table as well as an open bottle of hot sauce and tea tree.
He was already bloating when found.
Turns out, he enjoyed stuffing these up his rectum coated in the sauce or oil.
Well, he ended up causing a tear in his colon lining and threw a clot that killed him.
Story two, I'll keep this shorter.
Guy ran himself over with his own car... Because he took it out to the mesa and chained himself with bdsm hooks in his skin, set his car up to run slowly in a circle and pull him.
He tripped and couldn't get out if the way in time...
Lastly, wife was accused of murder and no where to be found when her husband's body was found in their back yard with a gun shot wound to the head at an odd angle, gun still in hand, and a scratch on his head.
Initially it was thought she hit him with something, shot him and took off.
When found, she told them he shot himself.
Claims they had a fight, he took out his
gun and went out back to blow off steam.
He was scratching his head with the pistol and the gun went off.
Sure enough, tissue was found on the sight and it explained the angle.
When asked why she didn't call police she says, "I didn't want to deal with that bs, the idiot shot himself while scratching his head with the damn gun!"
Edit: several typos, clarifying
Old people are often found dead on the toilet.
Apparently straining makes their blood pressure do bad things.
Then the family has an icky story to tell about grandpa but they usually edit it to 'died peacefully in his sleep'.
Former 911 operator.
Had a guy go into his garage, lay down, and drop a running circular saw on his throat.
Had another, when I worked Search and Rescue, who took an entire bottle of Ambien, took off his pants, then wandered off into the woods.
In January.
Im not one but my mom is an EMT and i had her spill the beans, she said a few had stuck out.
She had showed up to a house after a neighbor called 911 cause of a super loud scream, but long story short the scream came from a dude who got his um *nether regions* bitten by his snake, the dude was dead and the snake was still holding on to him when they found him.
A lady was once scalped cause her hair got stuck in a paper shredder my mom said that they had to rip out the office carpet cause there was so much blood 3.)
Last but not least, a lady and her wife had both been attcked by some stray dogs after trying to take a picture with them, one of the women died and the other
one had lost her arm.
So moral of the story, ***Don't beep with scary animals and listen to the warnings on paper shredders***
Detective who has gone to a number of autopsies.
A Guy had a part of his skull removed to relive pressure to the skull from a head injury.
They placed the circular piece of skull back and attached it with a few screws and over time it would fuse.
A year later the guy tripped in his study and hit that exact spot on the edge of a chair causing it to shunt the skull piece onto his brain.
Worker on construction site slipped and skewered himself on rebar framing on a building.
Metal bar through the legs and through out his torso.
Died while fire fighters were cutting the bar below him to extract him
A woman belonging to a religious cult was studying abroad and got engaged.
On returning home her parents didn’t approve of her partner.
She got sicker and sicker.
While in hospital her parents went to her workplace and binned her belongings and informed them she won’t be back.
Told fiancé he’s not welcome at the hospital and two weeks later she died.
Parents slowly poisoned her to death only becoming suspicious when toxicology came back after death
This kid didn’t die, but easily the wildest beep thing I’ve ever seen at the hospital.
6 year old kid was sledding.
He veered off the path and hit a tree.
Sticking out of that tree was an arrow that someone had shot in there.
Somehow, some way, he ended up oriented in a position where the arrow (keep in mind the point of the arrow was IN the tree, thus the end sticking out was the blunt, feathered end) impaled him right above the his right collar bone, passed down through his neck, and stopped less than a 1 cm behind his heart.
Narrowly missed several major arteries including his aorta, and only ‘scraped’ his trachea.
But it gets even wilder, during the incident, the kid remained conscious to the point where he actually BROKE THE ARROW OFF from the tree, and walked back inside with an arrow in his neck/chest.
He made a full recovery.
Easily the craziest beep I’ve ever witnessed.
The kinda stuff you’d see on TV
Not a medical examiner but my chem lab prof had this story about why you tie your hair up in lab.
Girl in chem lab with long hair leaned over a centrifuge.
This was in the 1970s before they had tops that close while they're running.
The hair got tangled in the ends of the test tubes in the centrifuge and in the blink of an eye pulled her face first into it.
Of course the ends of the six test tubes immediately shattered and carved her face up at 20,000 RPM or whatever it was running at while yanking chunks of her scalp out.
Blinded, scalped, and face torn off in just a couple of seconds flat.
After several weeks in the hospital she came out horribly disfigured, then soon after got an infection in her sinuses and died in agonizing pain a few weeks later.
Everyone in lab always tied up their hair.
There was a guy next town over growing up that got severely constipated, but refused to go to the doctor or do anything about it.
Didn’t beep for like 3 weeks.
Eventually the toxins built up in his body to a level that was deadly and he well...crapped out.
I'm a pool attendent a a coworker told me that once they had a guy trying to dive through the pool.
Underway he found a coin and put it into his mouth so he can swimm the rest normaly.
He inhaled the coin and died.
Not a medical examiner, but one of my friends works at a morgue.
Apparently, they had a body come in of a 20-something year old guy.
Dude was apparently mauled by an animal the size of a fully grown Great Dane.
He lived alone and has no pets and doesn't live anywhere close to the wild.
My friend was a bit unnerved from that, I would be too and kinda am.
As a final year nursing student slippers, beep slippers cause so manny serious and detrimental falls in our elderly population
I found a guy in the woods who hung himself, but instead of the cliche hanging from a limb with his feet off the ground he sat down on a slope and kept scooting lower until he died, found out a week later in the newspaper that he was facing charges for being a pedo so he took the easy way out.
It was weird though.
Not an ME, but my cousin Walter broke his neck trying to suck his own dick.
Heart attack during sex.
Some lady on kitchen nightmares had a kidney stone so big she went into a coma and died
When I worked in the ER, we had a guy come in with a gangrenous foreskin.
Died a few hours later.
I guess actual cause of death would be sepsis, but the gangrenous foreskin sounds way cooler.
this thread just gave me a lot of unnecessary fears
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