I worked a few Summers at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio when I was in high school. My Dad was a doctor, and well known throughout the hospital. It was his primary hospital. He had done his Internship and Residency there, was Chief of Staff, so very well known..
I remember my first night working there, 4pm to midnight. I was a Receptionist Escort, I took people to their rooms when they came in for surgery or various procedures. I knew many of the staff and doctors, grew up with many of them.
It was around eleven pm, and I got a call to go to the surgical department. I took the elevator, got off, went in, and was handed a leg, wrapped in a towel, with the foot and the upper portion exposed to me. I was instructed to take it to the morgue.
To get to the morgue, I had to take an elevator to the basement, walk through a long, spooky, dark underground tunnel to the morgue, which was in one of the older buildings in the complex.
I carried it out in front of me, foot bobbing a bit on my left, exposed stub on the right, down through that seemingly endless dark tunnel.
I was greeted by some staff, three doctors who I knew, and four nurses that I knew. All with BIG broad grins on their faces. One doctor friend called my Dad on the phone and relayed the incident to him.
My second night I was invited to watch an autopsy on a recently deceased man who had died of a brain tumor. I even got to watch the neurosurgeon as he did his job ..... After the first incisions, and not passing out, it was interesting. The main part of the autopsy was performed my one Dr. Pancho Padilla, a Resident from Cuba. He started his autopsy recording rhetoric in English, forgot himself, and did most of it in Spanish.
Oddly, when he completed his Residency, he returned to Cuba, and became one of Castro's physicians, we learned.
