Dear Dad,
As part of my job as an Assistant District Attorney in a rural upstate New York county I also share the duties of being the on call county coroner for roughly two-months out of the year. While on call in this role, anytime there is an “unattended death” in the county my phone rings. My job becomes analyzing the circumstances surrounding the death and determining if any suspicious circumstances exist and thereby deciding whether to release the body of the deceased to a chosen funeral home or send the body to the medical examiner for an autopsy. I’ll never forget the first call I ever received as the coroner on call.
It was just after 3 a.m. on a snowy night in late February and my phone rang on the nightstand. Very groggy, I answered the phone still in bed. The officer on the other end affirmed that there was a death and he needed further instructions on the next steps. Still wondering if my role would require me to get out of bed I asked the officer for more details to determine where the body of the deceased needed to go. “Tell me about the body that was found?”
There was a long pause before the officer replied.
“Well, it’s not so much a body. We only found a head.”
If you can imagine this woke me up fast, I immediately got out of bed, and I set up an impromptu work station on the kitchen table. Over the next few hours more details were presented and the full picture become less mysterious, though equally tragic. (More body parts were found, the cause of death was a fire, likely started from a cigarette left burning, and the deceased—a wheel chair bound person— could not escape).
Over the last couple years I have never had a call so alarming. In fact, a vast majority of the calls I receive as a county coroner support the statistics that we already know to be true: the leading cause of death across the population is heart disease; not criminally suspicious circumstances.
Specifically, in the U.S. heart disease is the leading cause of death in both men and women.1 Heart disease includes the well-known heart attack, but is more generally defined as disease of the heart and blood vessels most often caused by atherosclerosis, which is the build up of plaque in your arteries. Many of the risk factors for heart disease you may know, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, age, and family history, but some are a little less known, like the link between diabetes and heart disease (type-2 diabetics are 2-4x more likely to develop heart disease), other inflammatory conditions such as gout, irritable bowel syndrome, and arthritis also contribut to developing heart disease—chronic inflammation damages blood vessels which inhibits blood flow.
PSA: Speaking of blood flow..to all the men reading, ED is one of the first signs of heart disease, demonstrated by inhibited blood flow to the smaller arteries in your body. If you feel the need to dabble with Cialis or Viagra, do yourself a favor and get a blood panel done.
On a common coroner call the responding officer will rattle off to me a few health details of the deceased, “history of high blood pressure and cholesterol,” then confirm with a doctor of record that the person previously exhibited signs of approaching mortality. As someone in law enforcement a death in this manner is not criminally suspicious, but it is socially suspicious because it does not have to happen. There are many things we can do to fend off heart disease and I’m tired of taking so many of these calls. And, as you can probably guess by now, changing the narrative starts with food and lifestyle.
Eat well, move often, and manage stress. How we eat determines the particles flowing through our bloodstream and helps us maintain a healthy weight. Moving your body often also promotes blood flow, strengthens your heart’s ability to beat powerfully, and also helps maintain a healthy weight. Chronic stress inflames the body, causes damage to your blood vessels, raises blood pressure, and is correlated to overeating bad foods. You must find a way to manage stress.
In a comedy sketch I listened to recently the comedian makes the joke that his benchmark of health is that if we found out that he died, we would at least be prompted to ask “aww what happened?” Instead of responding, “yeah, sure he did.”
If I took the stage, I could imitate his sketch by setting my own health benchmark, that when I die, make the on call coroner get out of bed and set up a work station.
With Love,
JSR