Alone in a Morgue Refrigerator

ALONE IN A MORGUE REFRIGERATOR



My task was to take a newly deceased person down to the basement of the hospital and put him in the morgues large walk-in refrigerator.

No problem. I’d been down to the morgue more times than I could remember. It’s a little cold and it has its own distinct smell, but if you like peace and quiet, it’s a nice place to hang out.

The body on the gurney was wrapped in a white sheet and looked like a mummy. Usually when I’m pushing a mummy around on a gurney I take greater care to avoid the living. Taking a wrong turn and accidentally strolling by the kid’s daycare waiting room is considered unprofessional.

A dead person being wheeled around a hospital is just something people don’t like to see. Dead people scare living people. I understand that.

I treat the deceased with great respect and care. My only problem with the dead is how much they weigh. I don’t know where the term “dead weight” originally came from, but it sure applies here.

The morgue “storage facility” is a huge walk-in refrigerator with a big heavy door, a big heavy latch and this one had an industrial spring in the hinge so no matter what; the door is going to close. From the outside it looks like something you would see in a restaurant.

Different things are kept in morgue refers. There are whole bodies on gurneys or on shelves for people who have died on the nursing floors or in the Emergency Department. They await an autopsy or pickup by a funeral home. There are also body parts from the surgical department after amputations from either disease or trauma.

The big stainless steel door, the huge handle, the cold air; the brain just expects to see boxes of lettuce and melons and cold cuts. What you get is mummies and things wrapped in white that are obviously shaped like a foot, or an arm, or a leg, or a leg with a foot.

Even after a couple of years, it’s still really not the most normal of places to be in, especially if you have an imagination that can take off on its own.

If you keep your thinking on a clinical level, you should do just fine. But if you suffer from the occasional “moments of stupid,” like I do, then things can get out of hand rapidly.

Case in point. This is one of my moments of stupid that I often try and forget. The elapsed time; thirty seconds.

I pull up to the refer door with my gurney and give the handle a big yank and wheel on in. All I have to do is find this guy a good parking space and I’m gone.

I’m already a good ten feet inside when my brain perks up and says, “Don’t forget to turn on the light Mike.” I look around and there’s plenty of light because the door is still open. That’s when I heard the quiet swoosh of the door beginning to slowly close.

My brain warned me, “The light! Get the light,” in a slightly urgent tone that emphasized that time might be running short.

It’s the same voice you hear just before you slam your own fingers in a car door, which is locked and you can see your keys through the glass on the seat.

My brain would say something like, “Don’t do that, you’re gonna…OH, too late, times up. You are some kind of stupid.”

Anyway, I hear the rapidly accelerating swoosh of the morgue refrigerator door closing. My brain is pressuring me, “Don’t let the door close. Turn the damn light on, Hurry up!”

I frantically look around for the light switch and instantly realize that I don’t have a clue where it is. I look at the door closing and calculate that even with the Six-Million Dollar Man bionic sound effect playing in my head, I’m still too far away to stop it from… Clack!

The last image I see before the inky blackness enveloped me was a foot, sans a body, three inches from my head and two linen white torsos with mummy heads.

It’s like looking directly at a flashbulb. Every time you blink, the images glow on the inside of your eyelids, pulsing until they fade away and the dark abyss closes in.

Suddenly I’m in blackness so black, it’s shocking. Shocking because you had no idea how dark, dark can be.

As I entered my state of stupid, I let go of the gurney I was pushing. In effect, it was like taking a knife and cutting the lifeline that tethers you to a spaceship.

Now you’re totally detached from any worldly object. Now you’re just floating out there in a black hole. That foot you last saw could be close enough to poke you in the eye, or it could be across the room. Or, it could be sneaking up behind you with the two mummy head torsos!

Some sixth sense told me that I was waving my hand in front of my face to idiotically prove to myself how dark it was. I couldn’t see it and I didn’t want to touch my face, primarily because if anything had touched my face at that moment, I would have freaked. I would have shit, died, come back to life and had the biggest freak-out any of those corpses had ever heard.

The silence was deafening, but then I heard the sound of breathing. This made every hair on my body stand straight up. I was one step passed the line of rational thought to realize it was my own breathing.

I had to get control of myself before my run-away imagination made me totally loose it and do something monumentally stupid like run blindly into a wall, knock myself out, only to be found later laying in a pile of gallbladders with a huge frozen wet spot on the front of my scrub pants.

Something that stupid could never be lived down. My only option would be to cover the wet spot and walk out of the hospital and never come back.

I had to control myself. I remembered what my Dad had always told me when I was a kid. “There isn’t anything there in the dark that isn’t there in the day.”

My brain wasted no time in reminding me just what was there in the daylight; amputated feet and dead people that were sneaking up behind me. My Dad obviously had never been in this situation.

My internal gyroscopic emergency navigation system screamed, “Screw this!” I felt myself stumble forward with my arms stretched out in front of me. I knew there was a big metal button knob on the inside of the refrigerator door. If I could crash into that, then the tomb door would open.

Pure instinctive blind luck took over and my hands slammed dead on the knob. Clack!

I burst out of the door into the florescent tube light of the living like I had been under water drowning. I gasped that first gulp of air with a tremendously embarrassing noise.

Instantly I was back in control. I did a 360-degree hopping turn like an obese ninja to make sure no one had seen me loose my mind. Since the morgue usually isn’t teaming with people, I was alone with my embarrassment.

I let out a brief giggle-laugh-sob and cursed my imagination. I did a quick check with my hand like I was making sure my zipper was closed, but I was really making sure it was dry. Listen, I’m not that young anymore and overactive bladder incontinence is no laughing matter.

I straightened myself up and swaggered toward the elevator like nothing had ever happened. Just your normal, everyday thirty seconds alone in a morgue refrigerator.