My last day at work was the day before Leah was born. I was awakened by labor pains at six o’clock on that April morning. I called my obstetrician and informed him the contractions were fifteen minutes apart. He told me I could expect to deliver the baby in about twelve hours.
“Should I come into the hospital?”
“Only if you want to sit in a waiting room for twelve hours,” the doctor replied.
T.J. and I looked at each other, there in our little Bronx apartment. “Okay, let’s get comfortable,” he suggested. “We can go for a walk, take Dan to the park if you feel like it. Keep timing the contractions, and when the time comes, I’ll call a cab.” But then I started to worry, and only one look at my husband’s face told me his gears were grinding the same way. Twelve hours—that would mean taking a cab from the Bronx into Manhattan at the height of evening rush hour. Okay, so maybe we should go sooner, make sure we beat rush hour, and wait around in the hospital for . . . how long?
Then I had a revelation. “No—I’ll go to work,” I proclaimed, and T.J. laughed. “I’m serious. I should take the bus to work like I do every morning, like I did yesterday morning.”
We knew precisely how long my bus commute took—that fifty-five minutes never varied by much—and if I kept to my routine, we didn’t need to sit in the NYU birth ward waiting room, growing more anxious by the minute. “The bus lets me off only a couple of blocks from my office, and my office is attached to the hospital. I can just sit at my desk, do some paperwork, time the contractions.”
My husband smiled. “When your OB gives the green light, I’ll leave Danny with your mom, take the train down to meet you, and help you waddle next door to NYU, right?” The more we discussed this plan, the less crazy it sounded.
So that’s what I did—donned my NYC MEDICAL EXAMINER jacket and went out to the corner of Kappock Street to wait for the East Side express bus. When I trundled my way into 520 First Avenue an hour later and revealed to my colleagues that I was in labor, most of them went into a state of sitcom panic. The mommies were the exception; the women who had given birth pronounced our plan a perfectly sound one. I spent the day at my desk, male colleagues flitting past nervously every ten minutes to ask me if I was okay. One of them insisted on bringing me a light lunch. After eating it under his watchful eye, I walked next door (escorted unbidden by another chivalrous colleague) to visit the obstetrician. The contractions were getting harder but were still ten minutes apart. The doctor sent me back with instructions to check into the hospital once contractions were steady at seven minutes. I was grateful—because it gave me the opportunity to spend my last hour at work, the end of two years as a New York City medical examiner, in afternoon Hirsch rounds.
T.J. left Danny with my mother and came to meet me, and the two of us went out to a Thai place on Third Avenue. “You realize this is our last dinner date in New York?” he said ruefully. Even with contractions every eight minutes, it was a rosy and romantic one, and I smiled and took his hand across the table. In spite of everything, my husband had grown to love the city. My city.
We checked into the maternity ward at eight o’clock that evening, and Leah was born at dawn the next day. Six weeks later, just days before we were to leave for the new job in California, I brought the baby to our fellowship graduation party. Dr. Hirsch had reserved a private room in one of his favorite restaurants, not far from the office. The place had a supper club feel, with heavy velvet curtains and linen tablecloths. “Candles!” T.J. exclaimed, “and no crayons!” He enjoyed the company of adults while my colleagues were distracting Leah with coos and tickling. Hirsch and Flome gave short speeches and posed for pictures with the fellows and their diplomas, and then I was able to make my way around the room, trying to convey my gratitude to all my coworkers now that we were out of scrubs and behaving like ordinary civilians.
When I reached Monica Smiddy’s table, I told her that watching her calm professionalism on September 11 had pulled me back from the edge of panic. She responded with a laugh of surprise. “I was overwhelmed! We’d never trained for anything like that! No one had. I was barely keeping myself together.” Monica paused, then looked right at me, clear-eyed and proudly serious. “No. That’s not true. I felt like I was barely keeping it together—but I knew I could rely on my training. And so can you. That’s Dr. Hirsch’s doing, not mine.”
“You know,” I said, “one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever had came from a homicide detective at my autopsy table, who told me that I examined and described bodies ‘exactly like Dr. Smiddy.’ I couldn’t wish for higher praise.”
A happy ending has to have a wedding, of course, and for our office it was Karen Turi’s. Dr. Turi had met a police sergeant while they were both working long, raw hours in the World Trade Center recovery effort. Amy the anthropologist played matchmaker, but Karen and the sergeant hadn’t needed much urging to start a romance. We had all felt, in the wake of that experience, the need to connect with others who had gone through it. For them this impulse had grown into love. The graduation party was the first chance for many of us to meet Karen’s husband, and to congratulate the two of them on their baby.
Eventually I found an opportunity to corner the boss. I told Dr. Charles Hirsch that he had become the mentor I had always hoped my late father would have been. He accepted my thanks with characteristic grace and humility. “Good luck in California,” Dr. Hirsch said, “and remember, you can call me anytime.” He wore the same expression of relaxed good cheer I had seen on Friday afternoons when he would end our three o’clock meeting by asking, “Any old business, new business, monkey business? No? Why, then, I think I’ll go home and have a double.”
During my two years at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, I performed 262 autopsies; a dozen years later, I have performed more than 2,000. Still, every day I learn something new about the human body. I love the work, the science, the medicine. But I also love the nonmedical aspects of the job—counseling families, collaborating with detectives, testifying in court. I find I work hardest at these roles, at speaking for the dead. 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.
Acknowledgments
Both of us wish to express our gratitude to Jennifer Holm for lighting the fire, to Chip Rossetti for passing it on, and, most of all, to Jessica Papin of Dystel & Goderich for kindling it higher than we ever imagined it would climb. Thanks to the entire production staff at Scribner, especially president Susan Moldow, publisher Nan Graham, our patient and tireless editor Shannon Welch, copy editor Cynthia Merman and production editor Katie Rizzo, and John Glynn for his fearless help wrestling the bear into its cage. We will always be grateful to Alexis Gargagliano for taking us on.
Judy would like to thank her mentor, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, and the doctors and staff of the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, whose dedication to teaching made this book possible. Thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Wagar of the University of California, Los Angeles, who took me in and guided me in the specialty of pathology.
T.J. would like to thank his mentor, John Briley, for invaluable example, advice, and friendship over many years. Thanks also to Catherine Ehr, to Amy Z. Mundorff, PhD, to Sarah Lansdale Stevenson for coming through in the clutch, to Dr. Sarah Dry for insight and encouragement, and especially to Ron Santoro, CFX, who imbued his creative passion in all of us who had the privilege to study and work with him.
Last, but never, ever least—thank you, Dina.
About the Authors
Judy Melinek is a forensic pathologist and an associate clinical professor at UCSF Medical Center. She earned her college degree from Harvard and received her medical degree and pathology residency training at UCLA. She has worked and lived in San Francisco with her husband, T.J. Mitchell, and their children since 2004.
T.J. Mitchell graduated with an English degree from Harvard and worked in the film industry befo
re becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad in 2000.
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Certain names and identifying characteristics, including those of patients and their families and police investigators, have been changed.
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Jacket photographs: hand with scalpel by Tal Goretsky; tile © Roger Schmidt/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images
Author photograph © Douglas Zimmerman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Melinek, Judy.
Working stiff : two years, 262 bodies, and the making of a medical examiner / Judy Melinek, MD, and T.J. Mitchell.
pages cm
1. Melinek, Judy. 2. Forensic pathologists—New York (State)—New York—Biography.
3. Medical examiners (Law)—New York (State)—New York—Biography. I. Mitchell, T.J. II. Title.
RA1025.M45A3 2014
614’.1092—dc23
[B] 2014017610
ISBN 978-1-4767-2725-7
ISBN 978-1-4767-2727-1 (ebook)
Contents
* * *
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Acknowledgments
Working Stiff Page 24