Self-Portrait as Autopsy Report by Ruby Huang

The patient was a 17-year-old Asian female
with no significant past medical history
(or no significant future) 
who hopes this isn’t forever.
Two minutes after arrival at UTMB at 1500, 
the patient became hysterical, hypothetical, and had ghost saturations from 80-90%.  
The patient’s heart rate decreased to asystole, fingerprints
on its fine mucosal membrane.  
It’s a shame, really. Bedside echocardiogram showed no signs of a slaughterhouse
screaming martyr, just a poem written in blood.  
The patient was pronounced dead at 24:16 with light-spangled arteries, 
pale orange flowers, and an absent heartbeat. 

The body is that of a 17-year-old well-developed,  
well-nourished female. There is no peripheral edema of her wanting.  
A nasogastric tube and endotracheal tube are sliced open by words,  
splintered into names, mouth void of poems.
All she could find were faces. 

The right and left pleural cavity contains 10 ml of clear fluid with no adhesions.  
The pericardial sac is yellow, glistening without adhesions or fibrosis and contains  
67.5 ml of a bluegrass-colored music. In the aftermath,  
she is trying to forget your heartbeat. There is minimal fluid in the peritoneal  
cavity, but the patient claims she would  
end the world if it meant she could write well again. 

The heart is large with a normal shape and a weight  
of 400 grams or something heavier. It appears to have been wrung out  
by the patient herself. The pericardium is intact, ascension, benediction. 
The epicardial fat is diffusely firm. How is she supposed to explain  
that she has never been an artist, that all a poet wants is to  
feel something, to hold someone?  
As patient was greater than 48 hours post-mortem, no searchlight through the aorta  
was utilized.
Upon opening the heart was grossly normal without evidence of infarction,  
just writing eulogies and apologies every day.  
There were slightly raised white plaques in the left ventricle wall lining. 

The right lung weighed 630 grams,  
the left weighed 710 grams. The lung parenchyma is pink  
without evidence of congestion of hemorrhage. The bronchi  
are grossly normal.  
In the right lung, there are two large organizing thrombo-emboli,  
patient calls herself destructive  
but her tissue remains tender. 

Poet is dragged onto lab bench,  
poet is gutted and dissected.  
Poet wakes up to ask if this is the end of the world and is met with no,  
it’s just the end of your life but it all sounds the same anyway.  
Although a cause of death may sometimes be obvious, 
the underlying mechanism for the death may still be elusive. This patient  
was otherwise a completely healthy 17-year-old woman  
with one known reason for survival. Remaining unanswered questions:  
why would she put you in everything she writes when it will only  
make her remember sooner? The cause of the hypercoaguable state is  
undetermined—she is trying to forget. Once that question is answered  
I believe this autopsy will have done a great service  
for the patient’s family,  
if she were still alive she’d be telling you to  
come home,  
just come home. 



Works Cited: https://www.utmb.edu/meded/year4/autopsy_4th_year/autopsyreportsample.pdf