Feast or famine. Only two cases today. One was a ruptured MI. His arteries were in really bad shape. I guess he liked his fast food (he wasn't fat, but probably had a high cholesterol diet). It was easy to determine why he died, but it was more difficult to determine how he survived at all with those arteries. This man obviously had a poor diet, but who knows what kind of diet to have these days. Some people preach the all meat diet and no carbohydrates. Others rely on the good old fashioned pyramid. Who knows?

The other case was a woman with psychological problems who had been falling a lot lately. She had a nice subdural hematoma on the right side. That was another nice and easy case to determine the cause of death.

Monday was a really busy day. There was another homicide via a handgun and a couple of traffic accidents. In one of the traffic accidents the people that died were the ones that were not wearing their seatbelts and were therefore ejected from the car. Moral here: do as they say and buckle up. You know, those people that came up with those fun traffic slogans, such as "buckle up" and "don't drink and drive," were pretty clever. Don't believe me? Read over incident reports of traffic accidents and see how many deaths are due to alcohol related accidents and lack of seat belt. Or wait, you know what, forget what I said. People do need to die to keep the medical examiners and coroners in business. As one of the doctor's motto goes: human stupidity = job security. There were a couple of other cases (including a stinker). I don't remember all of the cases that well since it was so busy. Its kind of hard to appreciate the different pathologies on a busy day.

Today there was a man with a stomach ulcer that broke through the stomach wall. It seemed to be caused by bacteria because there was pus on his intestines in his abdomenal cavity. There was also an apparent suicide by drug overdose. A forensic pathologist has a rule of thumb to determine if an overdose was accidental or suicidal. If there are a few pills in the GI tract then it is accidental. If there are a lot of pills then it is most likely suicidal. We also had an alcoholic today. He had the typical signs of alcoholism: fatty and cirrhosed liver, enlarged spleen, and jaundice. His coronaries were nice and clear though. While alcohol abuse is destroying your liver, it does keep your coronaries clean.