Pushing Up Lilies

•  The one thing that we don't do is autopsies. Now, you may find in some offices that the investigators have multiple jobs, and one of them may be to serve as an autopsy tech and also investigate the death, those may be in smaller offices where they have fewer staff members and they utilize the investigators also as autopsy tech. In our office though, we do not... Ultimately, the autopsies are do...

•  We'll get a lot of questions about autopsies and whether or not people should have one done on their loved one, or if they have to have one done. Back in the day, they used to do autopsies, I would say just about on everyone. Of course, there's always those exceptions. But now, because of the population, it is absolutely impossible to do an autopsy, a full autopsy on everyone. The medical exami...

 • I usually look back at someone's life or history or the way they were raised, and you can somehow put two and two together as to why they turned out this way or why they think this is acceptable behavior. But Meiwes actually had two older half brothers and his father abandoned him when he was 8. He had a desire for cannibalism, and he said it was related to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel....

•  We realized that a lot of people are estranged from their families. And so I guess what I like to do is always encourage people to have someone that can check on them on a daily basis, or just to check and make sure that they're okay. So if there's an elderly person that lives next door to you, please check on them, they don't always have family, they don't always have someone that's calling th...

•  We may go home smelling like a decomposed body, and sometimes we forget because we're so used to it. I know I've gone into a scene before where the body's been there for a couple of days, it's decomposing, the smell is bad, they may be covered in flies, gnats, maggots, I'm covered in deep sweat and stench... And have walked into a restaurant and stood in line for a sandwich, forgetting complete...

Every journey has a beginning, and this is mine. Before forensic nursing became a recognized specialty and long before crime scene television shows made forensics mainstream, I found myself drawn to a career that would ultimately change my life. In this very first episode of Pushing Up Lilies , I share how I went from working as an emergency room nurse to becoming a Forensic Nurse Death Investigat...