Jasmine: All the smells of the rainbow

Putrefaction and Autolysis, sigh, just those two words send my nose all tingly and a smile across my face. Things that happen to the body after death has been the theme in my forensic anthropology class for some time now and a few days ago my teacher got down to the actual decomposition of the materials. Yay!

Autolysis, not to be confused with autothysis, is the natural breakdown of the cells in our body. When we stop breathing, essentially living, we stop being able to produce lots and lots of ATP (energy) with that oxygen. But our body, though dead, continues to produce the ATP, and by doing so ends up producing lots and lots of lactic acid. Those of you who remember glycolysis and the kreb cycle should know this. If you don’t or never knew it, lactic acid is what causes your muscles to burn when you exercise hard, this is because you are exercising so fast that the oxygen you take in can’t be used for ATP fast enough and so lactic acid is built up.

This build of lactic acid degrades the cell and actually degrades the cell to cell connections. If you were alive you would heal this before it got this far. Organs sort of liquefy, and coagulate into a thick sticky, kinda mushy chunky fluid. The brain actually liquefies to a grey soup. The skin stays intact mostly for a while and we become a bag of smelly fluid. When the cells degrade, sulfur containing amino acids methionine and homocysteine and possibly others, degrade into hydrogen sulfide which reacts with iron from the blood to create black ferrous sulfide. Blood vessels close to the surface are visible as black lines. This gives off a marbling effect. We become a marble smelly bag of fluid!

Secondly Putrefaction, it’s the better known aspect of decomposition, or at least more often mentioned. All over and all inside our bodies are bacteria. The human body actually contains more bacterial cells then human cells a lot of them are even necessary to human survival. These live primarily in our intestines. While our body is alive it keeps all of these bacteria at bay. The moment we stop living and fighting them, they eat us alive. One of the products of the bacteria eating us is methane gas. It accumulates in the body hugely bloating the body including swelling the tongue out of the mouth as the gas tries to find a way to escape. The swelling continues until the maggot mass (another lovely aspect of dying) eats through the abdominal wall releasing the gasses.

I don’t know why I felt the urge to blog this. I know I find it interesting and I will forever and ever, but many of you readers will probably be disgusted. Because this will happen to all of you unless you take precautions. I urge you, find a vampire, make friends, convince them to turn you into one of their kind. That or go the Egyptian route and mummify that body. Or cremation. Okay there are lots of routes. I prefer the vampire one but I’m not going to force my opinion on you.