Life and Death in Texas.

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Texas Embalmer Shares Nightmare COVID Experiences: 'Unlike Anything I've
Seen Before' "I don’t know how much longer I can keep working this way,"
the funeral professional told HuffPost. Noah Michelson, By Noah
Michelson, 09/13/2021, 09:08am EDT | Updated September 13, 2021.

Patrick Huey contacted HuffPost after reading a story about a
Florida-based ICU doctor who broke down on CNN while being interviewed
about patients dying of COVID-19. The Texas-based funeral professional,
who has worked as an embalmer for the past 30 years and won the South
Central Texas Funeral Directors Association’s first-ever Embalmer of the
Year award in 2019, offered to share his own harrowing COVID-related
experiences, as well as the toll working in the funeral industry during
the pandemic is taking on him and his colleagues.

His account below has been lightly edited for clarity.

When COVID first started, we really didn’t know a whole lot about how it
was spread ? or, really, much else. There just wasn’t a lot of
information out there. A lot of the states were recommending or even
mandating not embalming bodies because so much was unknown at the time
regarding how contagious COVID was, how it was spread, the fatality
rate, and what chemicals effectively killed it.

As time went by, we found that the bodies could be embalmed. That’s our
preference if you have to store people for any length of time. Our
opinion is that it’s much, much safer if the body has been embalmed and
bathed, and then we can store them without having to utilize
refrigeration.

It wasn’t until about late November or early December of last year when
the surge really hit us in Texas, and then it was just awful. Just
awful. We were pulling 22- and 36-hour shifts, and we were short-handed
to begin with. We went like that until about the middle of March. At
that point about 65%, or maybe a little less, of the bodies we were
receiving had COVID.

The death rate in general over the past few years has been
unprecedented. The baby boomer generation has begun to die, and we are
seeing more bodies than ever before. Add COVID to that and we’re
reaching a breaking point.

“We get bodies out of ICU regularly, but not in the condition that these
COVID bodies are in.”

We’ve just had to buckle down and do the best that we can. The internet
has been a blessing because it allows all of us embalmers to communicate
and find out what issues everyone is having because so much of this has
been unlike anything we’ve seen before. We get bodies out of ICU
regularly, but not in the condition that these COVID bodies are in.
They’re tremendously swollen. If they’ve been on a ventilator, that
often completely runs down their immune system. It also opens them up to
a lot of sepsis and secondary infections that tend to hang around
hospitals, like penicillin-resistant staph infections.

These folks were so swollen they were completely unrecognizable. We were
also getting sent a lot of people who had died from COVID in nursing
homes back at that time, and many of them had not been dead very long at
all. Generally when we embalm, we utilize a major artery to inject the
embalming fluid and we use its adjoining vein for drainage. The blood
tends to settle out because it’s no longer flowing and it’ll gravitate
to the dependent part of the body. The longer a body sits, the more
blood clots that they develop. I was having people that had only been
dead for a few hours and there were major clotting issues. The clots
were the size of pancakes ? you never, never see those with someone who
didn’t die of COVID.

I’ve been doing this for 30 years and pretty much everywhere I’ve worked
has been medium to high volume. I’m not one of those embalmers that
works at a place that just does 50 or 60 bodies a year. So I’ve done
this long enough and I’ve seen enough that I would know when something
different pops up. COVID is unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Many of the people who were in the ICU were on ventilators, and they put
adhesive patches on their cheeks. They can easily become septic and they
drip that septic saliva on the sides of their faces and the skin in that
area gets infected. We were literally receiving bodies with huge lesions
on their cheeks or [patches that had gone] gangrene. The sad part is the
families of these people, at that point, hadn’t been allowed to see
their loved ones during the several weeks that they were in the ICU. So
the body comes out in an almost unrecognizable condition, and then you
have to explain to their family that their loved one doesn’t look
anything like what they should.

Despite the fact that I specialize in postmortem reconstruction ?
accidents, trauma, stuff like that ? when the bodies are that swollen,
there is very little I can do to eliminate that. And for a lot of these
families, it’s just a tremendous shock. I’ve had husbands and wives die
within days of each other. I’ve seen entire families wiped out. It’s
horrible.

With this current surge from [the delta variant], I notice we’re not
getting bodies out of the nursing homes like we were the last time, most
likely due to the fact that most of these old nursing home patients have
been vaccinated. Right now the bodies I’m seeing are ranging from the
late 20s to the elderly. We’ve had quite a few bodies in their
mid-to-late 30s, 40s, 50s. I’ve also noticed that with delta, for the
most part, these people were not spending nearly as much time in the ICU
before they die. Sadly, that’s been to our benefit because they’re not
in as bad of a condition as they were with the last surge.

We’re just doing what we can, but we’re constantly worried about our own
safety while working. At my facility, we’re wearing N95 masks because
the filtration is so much better and it makes it a good positive seal on
your face. I’ve got a mask with a respirator that uses the P100
multivapor cartridges. Aside from that, we’re wearing our standard
personal protective equipment and taking extra precautions ? keep our
faces covered and doing whatever we can to keep our risks as low as we
possibly can. As far as handling the body goes, if you roll the body, if
you put pressure on the chest, there’s the chance of expelling air from
the lungs.

After we get done embalming a body, we pack the nasal passages and
everything else and once it’s bathed well and preserved well, to me,
it’s as safe as it can possibly be and should not pose a risk to the
families or anyone else who comes in contact with it. I really wish we
were embalming them all, but we just don’t have the manpower right now.
As far as licensed embalmers, there’s a definitely a big shortage,
especially down here in Texas.

Seeing so many of these people who have passed away who shouldn’t have
died in the first place and the husbands and wives passing within days
of each other ? on top of just the mass volume ? is a lot to deal with.
Although we try to distance ourselves professionally as much as possible
while doing our jobs, it wears on us. There are a lot of us that
definitely have some PTSD ? or just traumatic stress. It’s really,
really hard.

My wife and I don’t get to see much of each other. I’ve got two kids who
just started college, and they don’t get to see nearly as much of me as
they would like to. And it’s very difficult. Right now shifts start at 8
a.m. and we are currently working 19 to 20 hours the first day of our
two-day shifts. Then we’re back up after sleeping a few hours, and we
don’t sleep that second night of work. Then I go home and either work
other places in my town ? I live in East Texas and I drive to central
Texas for work and, even when I’m home, I often help out at the local
funeral home here and other places are calling for help ? or, if I am
lucky, I will sleep 30 hours straight. My downfall or failing has been
the inability to tell people “no” when they call for help.

I’d say 85% of the people who are coming in right now passed from COVID.
A lot of them are coming from the ICU. It’s not uncommon to get bodies
from there, but what is uncommon is to get seven or eight or 10 bodies a
day.

It’s so bad that we have had to get one of those large government FEMA
refrigerated trailers. We’ve never had that before. Our facility has the
ability to hold somewhere around 90 or 100 bodies in the walk-in
refrigerator in our building, and another smaller one in the garage will
hold another 18 or so bodies. And we’re full! If it comes down to it and
we completely run out of refrigeration space, we will wind up having to
embalm everybody that comes in that we can’t put into refrigeration.
Basically, if we can’t get a body into refrigeration or buried within 24
hours, then we have to embalm, and there are only so many people who are
qualified to do that.

“Although we try to distance ourselves professionally as much as
possible while doing our jobs, it wears on us. There are a lot of us
that definitely have some PTSD ? or just traumatic stress. It’s really,
really hard.”

I don’t know how much longer I can keep working this way. I’ll never
throw my hands up and just say “screw this!” If the good Lord calls me
home and I drop dead at the embalming table, then I guess that’ll make
for a day off.

We are losing staff in places. A lot of new folks are graduating from
mortuary school. They’re starting to work and are immediately slammed
with COVID cases and they can’t handle it and and they wind up getting
out. We’ve had a lot of funeral professionals who have gotten COVID, and
there have been several I know of who have died from it.

The smaller, independent funeral homes, when they’re dealing with COVID,
the next thing you know, their entire staff has it. And they pretty much
have to take the phone off the hook, lock doors and shut down because
they don’t have anybody to run the place. So, we’ve got a lot of
embalmers who are traveling around from place to place, just trying to
help out everybody who has shortages ? just to keep the doors open and
keep serving the public.

I’m on Facebook and whatever occasionally, but I don’t post a lot about
my job and about what I do, because it’s just my job and I just do it.
[The embalmers] are just doing the best that we can, and I wish that
people would just do the best that they can to stay safe. I want
everyone to take this seriously and to remember that the repercussions
of their actions run downhill, and we funeral professionals are down
near the bottom of that hill.

Lastly, I’ll just say I wish this would quit being such a political
thing. People want to blame one party or the other, and I don’t know
what the answer is. I do know that the studies have shown the
vaccination works and I wish more people would get it. And sometimes we
have to have our freedoms infringed upon just a little bit for the
betterment of the entire population. We’re just trying to do our part ?
and we wish everyone else would do the same.

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