I’ve never seen a dead person be wheeled out of a hospital in my life. How do they sneak them out without the carnival of spectators?
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I was an EMT while in college. When a baby died in the ER, not often, the funeral home would take the baby through the ambulance dock in a basket, similar to a picnic basket.
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If no autopsy is done and when someone dies in the hospital, they go to the mortuary and arrangements are made by the survivors with a funeral home who will pick up the deceased and bring it to the funeral home for burial preparations.
Because of the nature of death many services to transport folks in this manner can be basically on call, or next available. By that I mean if you’re working with a funeral home they may send someone out at 3:00 AM to drive hours, pick them up at the hospital, and return with the deceased.
During the pandemic things got pretty complicated, with the hospital running out of room for bodies and being forced to store them in refrigerated trucks. I was a news shooter covering that, and man…that was unsettling to photograph.
Decedents are removed from the morgue in the ground floor of the basement, in the rear of the hospital, by the loading docks, through a security check point, by a first call service.
Like, leave the hospital room to go to the hospital morgue? On a sort of covered cart. The cart has a covered frame so you can’t see the shape of the body, they’re not just under a sheet like in movies
From the hospital morgue, the funeral home comes to a service entrance to pick them up
There are different entrances and elevators visitors don’t see, just like when on a cruise ship.
When my BF died they shut the door of his room to clean him and swaddled him…that’s the only term I can think of. Then they left the door closed until the gentleman from the crematorium came to bag him up several hours later. He covered the body bag with sheets and strolled the gurney to the closest exit to the back of the hospital. From there we were in a back alley/loading doc area to put him in the van.
The hospital was very good about allowing his son and I to be part of the whole “death process”
The HMO hospital where I used to go had maternity on the top (6th ?) floor, Pedi on the next one down, so on to ER on ground floor, morgue in basement. Folks start at the top and spend their lives working their way down.
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