THE NEXT MORNING

In the pathology department Dr. Darrel Barton was looking over the night’s accumulation of work.  He looked at the gurney parked near the door.  It held three of the large specimen trays.  Seeing one of these was a relatively unusual event.  Rarely was a removed organ or specimen big enough to warrant their use.  But they were often used for small specimens when the smaller trays were not available.  He walked over and uncovered the closest tray; it contained what his practiced eye identified as a woman’s right leg.  The shape of the lower leg was decidedly female.  The knee was badly damaged.   Someone had performed an AK amputation during the night.  Although this was not an unusual surgery it was uncommon enough to attract attention.  Amputations for bone cancer were done during the day so that was not the reason.  The lower leg showed no signs of thrombosis so the amputation was most likely for trauma.  His first reaction was traffic accident since the damage to the area above the knee was definitely high energy.  Most likely the woman was riding a motorcycle or on foot.  These were the most frequent causes of emergency amputation of a leg.  Few other trauma had the physical energy to either amputate a leg or damage it to the extent that an emergency amputation was necessary.  There was a small specimen tray inside the large one with what appeared to be some bone fragments and some metal pieces.  They looked like bullet fragments.  The upper half of the leg looked badly bruised but the lower portion looked undamaged.  He covered the leg.  Even though he saw them regularly he had never become unmoved by the body parts he saw.  He remembered that for that part to be here in his lab someone had suffered a loss.  He brought an attitude of nearly reverence.  That tray would represent a significant amount of work for him, first to confirm the surgeon’s diagnosis that the leg really should have been amputated.  This was essential if the hospital was later named in a negligence suit.  The bullet brought in another aspect.  He would now need to collect any information the police might need.  If there were any foreign objects in the leg they must be removed and turned over to the crime lab.  In addition he must test the tissue for contamination.  He uncovered the second tray and had a similar reaction.  It contained another female leg, again a mid-thigh amputation, in fact almost at the same height.  If one woman lost both legs this high, mobility would be very difficult.  He looked again at the second leg.  It too was a right leg and the skin color was slightly darker.  He opened the first tray again and verified the first leg was also a right leg.  Easy to explain, two women riding a motorcycle were hit by a car.  He had seen that a couple times before.  But two things contradicted that.  There was the tray with what appeared to be a bullet and here was no road rash on the lower legs, almost certain in a motorcycle accident.  These legs were subjected to some intense localized trauma.  Whatever it was the women were lucky to be alive.