'I don’t know how much longer I can keep working this way,' the funeral professional told HuffPost.
Patrick Huey contacted HuffPost after reading a story aboutwhile 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.
, and we are seeing more bodies than ever before. Add COVID to that and we’re reaching a breaking point.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.
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.
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.
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 whatIt’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.
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.
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