This episode is brought to you by Thorne and I have some incredible news for any of you
that are in the military, first responder or medical professions.
In an effort to give back, Thorne is now offering you an ongoing 35% off each and every one
of your purchases of their incredible nutritional solutions.
Now Thorn is the official supplement of CrossFit, the UFC, the Mayo Clinic, the Human Performance
Project and multiple special operations organizations.
I myself have used them for several years and that is why I brought them on as a sponsor.
Some of my favorite products they have are their Multivitamin Elite, their Whey Protein,
the Super EPA and then most recently, Cynaquil.
As a firefighter, a stuntman and a martial artist, I've had my share of brain trauma
and sleep deprivation and Cynaquil is their latest brain health supplement.
Now to qualify for the 35% off, go to thorn.com, T-H-O-R-N-E dot com.
Click on sign in and then create a new account.
You will see the opportunity to register as a first responder or member of military.
When you click on that, it will take you through verification with GovX.
You'll simply choose a profession, provide one piece of documentation and then you are
verified for life.
From that point onwards, you will continue to receive 35% off through Thorn.
For those of you who don't qualify, there is still the 10% off using the code BTS10,
Behind the Shield 10 for a one time purchase.
To learn more about Thorn, go to episode 323 of the Behind the Shield podcast with Joel
Titoro and Wes Barnett.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show pathology assistant and the woman behind the gross room, Nicole and Jemmy.
So in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from becoming a single mother at
a very young age, her journey into the world of medicine, finding pathology, the creation
of the gross room, her perspective on obesity, cancer, the importance of underlying health,
mental health, the firefighter family and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 900 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Nicole and Jemmy.
Enjoy.
Well Nicole, I want to start by saying firstly thank you to Amy Loughran who was on the show.
The Good Nurse was the documentary about her life.
And she was the one that turned me on to all of your work.
So I want to thank her first.
Then I also want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Hi, I love Amy.
So thanks for recommending me, Amy.
So where on planet earth are we finding you today?
I am in New Jersey right outside of Philadelphia.
So I would love to start at the very beginning of your actual timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings.
Okay, so I was born in 1979 in New Jersey at a hospital in Woodbury, New Jersey actually.
I have parents, Beth and Lou, who are awesome.
I love them.
And they're still married.
They've been married almost 50 years.
And I have two siblings.
So I'm the oldest and then I have a sister who's younger than me.
Her name's Annie.
And then I have a brother who's a little bit significantly younger than me.
I would say I was in third grade when he was born.
So I'm really his bigger sister.
And his name's Louie.
And what about professions?
What were your parents doing?
So my mom was a stay at home mom for a majority of my life.
And she did cool little jobs like sell Avon.
And she always was like hustling to make some side money.
And then she eventually went to college for dietary nutrition.
And she was working in a nursing home, handling the nutrition for people there.
And then she ended up, she just retired last year, but she ended up going to Children's
Hospital and working in the diabetes division for the last years of her career.
And my dad was a diesel truck mechanic.
I literally was just talking to someone the other day who also works in pediatric diabetics.
And I was asking them, have you seen an uptick in diabetes?
And at first she was like, no, no, not really.
And then I realized she was talking about type one diabetes.
And I was like, what about type two?
And she was like, oh my God, it has exploded.
So what is your mom saying?
Yeah, same thing.
She retired last year, but she just couldn't, I mean, working in, she worked in Philadelphia
at one of the biggest children's hospitals in the country.
And yeah, she saw so many, cause she was the one that was scheduling the patients to meet
with the dieticians and things like that.
So she was talking to almost every single patient that was coming in there.
And it was like, the waiting list was ridiculous and just the amount of patients and new patients
every day, crazy.
And this is probably a very obvious question, but through her perspective, what is she talking
about as the reason for this swell in childhood type two diabetes?
It's diet.
Clearly, it's just like, everybody knows that.
So, yeah, that's the sad fact.
I saw, I mean, it went around the internet for a while, but it was, I forget now, but
it was one of the soda companies and they were, if you bought their soda, then it would
be a contribution to the American Diabetes Society.
And I'm like, or you could just not buy the soda.
Yeah.
I really try, they always say that at the pediatrician's office when I bring my kids,
what are the kids drinking?
It's a big thing.
And I'm always like, well, my one kid is obsessed with seltzer water, but it doesn't have sugar
in it.
It's just busy water, which I'm not sure if that's great to be drinking all day either,
but the pediatrician seems to be okay with it.
So.
Good.
Yeah.
And he was a little, he didn't like soda because of the bubbles.
He used to say it was spiky when he was young.
And so to this day, he doesn't drink soda.
He drinks juice, which we're aware of the sugar of some of that, but yeah, no soda,
which is a blessing for a parent.
Yeah.
We let our kids drink soda.
We say they could have it when we're on vacation and on their birthdays and holidays.
And they do take us up on that.
It'll be Christmas Eve and they'll say, can I have a can of Coke?
And I'm like, sure, go ahead.
Everything in moderation is fine.
And I feel like with kids, if you tell them you can't have this, they're going to go over
their friend's house and like shove it in their face all the time.
So I try to give them a little bit of the bad stuff sometimes.
I saw that same exact thing when I came to America, when it comes to alcohol in Europe,
you know, more so in the Mediterranean, but in the UK as well, we're exposed to alcohol
and we're little.
Like I grew up having watered down wine, you know, on Sundays sometimes with meals and
there wasn't a big stigma about it.
Now it's alcohol is not great.
We all know that, but you weren't held back.
And so, yes, you see, you know, excessive drinking in UK pubs, but you don't see the,
you know, keg stands and the beer pong and all the things because we've just always done
it.
It's not a novelty.
Then you come here and we've held our kids back and try to stigmatize it.
And then all of a sudden they get a college age and now they're just binge drinking and
doing shots.
And it's a very different culture than Europe.
Yeah.
My daughter went, my older daughter, she went to France as an exchange student and she was
only 17 when she went and they drank, they were allowed, we had to give them permission
to drink wine on the trip and all this stuff.
And, or maybe she was 18, I don't know.
But yeah, she said the culture over there was just like no big deal.
Teenagers drink all the time, whatever.
Yeah.
Now, what about with your mom and the nursing home?
Did you ever go with her to visit?
Did that give you any sort of kind of introduction to the medical side that you ended up pursuing?
I went there and visited her a bunch, but never, never really saw the medical side.
Just went right into the kitchen area where she worked.
Her office was outside of the kitchen there.
And that was kind of, I really didn't get any interest until I started going to college.
That's how I really got introduced to the whole world.
Now what about, obviously you have a certain style, you and your husband are both head
to toe in tattoos, which I love seeing a firefighter with tattoos.
I can't stand the demonization of that, that someone's going to stop mid rescue and be
like, you can't save me.
You've got tattoos on your neck.
Yeah, exactly.
But what about that whole kind of vibe?
Was that something that you found earlier or was that later in life?
Oh no.
I had the majority of my tattoos before the internet even came out.
I started getting them when I was 15.
And by the time I was 21, I had most of them that I have now.
I haven't really gotten too many more since then.
So what about career aspirations then?
Were you thinking about the world that you found yourself in when you were in school
age or was there something else?
No.
I was actually, I always examine this all the time because I was horrible in school.
I hated school.
I did poorly.
I had bad grades.
I was in what were called like special ed classes at the time.
I never really thought that I was smart.
And I just wasn't into school and I dropped out of school when I was 16 out of high school.
And it wasn't until I had a daughter when I was in ninth grade and that was when I was
like I have to go to school and get a career and get a job because I have a kid and I have
to get health insurance for her.
Because back then there was no such thing as like Obamacare or whatever.
It was just like you're beat.
You don't have health insurance.
And so when I was younger, people ask me that all the time.
Like did you want to be this when you grow up?
I actually can't even think of saying anything when I was a kid that I thought that I was
going to do when I grew up, which is weird.
But I just don't know.
But I started school and I thought like I'm going to go to school to be a nurse because
a couple of my cousins were nurses and I knew that they went to school only to get an RN
two or three years.
And then they ended up graduating and getting a good job with benefits and stuff.
So I said, well, I guess I'll just go do that.
I didn't even know what a nurse did or anything.
I just was like, I'm going to go to school and be a nurse and get a job.
Because I hated school.
So I thought what's the quickest path for me to go to college and get a decent paying
job?
That was my goal when I started school.
But then that was how I got introduced into the lab.
So what about becoming a mother at ninth grade?
I just had a guest a couple of weeks ago now who became a father when he was 17.
It's not something that we really think about.
Obviously, now there are television programs, but again, I don't think they're doing a
service to the moment that a child falls pregnant because I think most people put their hands
on their heart.
Many of us could have gotten many people pregnant and become pregnant many, many times when
we were younger.
It's just the luck of the draw and that moment in time.
So now you're 16 and you're becoming a parent.
Walk me through that.
How were you able to stay a good mother during that age and what support system was around
you at that moment?
Well, luckily I had my mom and dad, obviously, and my sister and brother.
We were all living in the same house and I had her and it was rough.
What can I say?
I know that they showed TV shows that are glamorizing it or something, but it was nothing
of that.
I mean, imagine being in ninth grade and having a baby and then trying to date.
No mom is going to want their son to be dating someone that has a kid already.
No guy is interested in being a kid's dad at that time.
So it was rough.
My mom and dad though, I lived at home with them and they took over the majority of all
of it.
I freaked out a little bit when I first had her and I just wanted to hang out with my
friends and just be like a normal teenager.
I was in and out of the house and my mom and my dad and my siblings were helping me out
all the time and stuff, but I just wanted to do normal stuff and it was rough.
But then eventually when I went to school, when I made the decision to go to school and
then I started going to school when I was 19 when I started college, I started straightening
my shit out and being like, okay, I have a kid, she's four years old or five years old,
whatever she was at the time.
I just have to get my life straight for her.
When I was talking to this guest before, it was interesting because there's a lot of stigma
about having a child at 16, for example.
However, if you look at our more ancient cultures, that's when women were having children, 15,
16, because that's obviously when we're most fertile, most reproducible up until our 20s.
But when you look back, it was an entire village that helped raise that child.
Now you look at our modern society in 2024, A, there's stigma around that and then B,
there's not that community, there's not that it takes a village.
A lot of these young mothers are on their own when they have these children.
I think this is an interesting perspective is that, yes, you can have children if you're
younger.
Is it what you chose?
Possibly not.
But is it the end of the world?
No.
However, the missing piece is just like you illustrated, who is your village?
Who are those people around you that can help raise that child just as we would have a thousand
years ago?
Yeah, I just don't know how that even would have went down, but it would have been ugly,
I'll tell you that, if I didn't have any help.
I think about that though sometimes.
What about single moms that then their teenager has a kid and the single mom is already leaving
the house all the time to try to work and support the family as it is?
Think about this.
I had my daughter when I was 15 years old.
I didn't even have my driver's license until she was two or three years old.
What do you do?
I lived in the burbs.
I didn't live in the city.
There was no such thing as a bus.
What do you do with your life?
You have to depend on people and that's what I did.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's beautiful to hear that you had the people to depend on because again,
I think there's a lot of things around where a lot of judgment cast when people put their
child into adoption.
But again, if it's a 15 year old girl with no support structure, that might be their
only chance for making sure that that child remains healthy.
This is the kind of bigger picture that a lot of people I think don't take into account
when they are casting judgment in certain situations.
Yeah.
Since I've been in this situation, it's a no-win situation, I'll tell you because I
actually got pregnant when I was in ninth grade and I was in Catholic school and they
told my mom she can't get an abortion because of the Catholic church and she can't be at
this school pregnant.
These are the choices that you're given.
I mean, this was almost 30 years ago, but now it's different.
They probably have a daycare center in the high school.
I don't know.
It's always been like, and it's been shitty for me.
The woman always gets the shitty end of the stick because the guy's just kind of sitting
by like whatever.
I'll just do whatever you decide, but you get the brunt of it being the woman.
Absolutely.
Well, fast forward a few years, now you're pursuing nursing.
Walk me through that journey and how you ended up finding cyto technology instead.
I start college and they say you have to take these prerequisite classes in order to get
into nursing school.
I had dropped out of high school when I was 16, so I barely even took classes.
A year of the time I was in high school, I was out because I was pregnant.
I basically didn't go to high school and take all of the normal classes.
They said, you have to take this math class, this biology class, this psychology class,
all this.
The very first day I show up to biology and I don't even really know what it's going
to be.
We're in there and then we take a lab.
The very first lab, we pull out microscopes and she has us cut a piece of an onion up
and take the skin off the onion and look at it under the microscope.
I don't even know what happened.
It was like this moment, something hit me over the head and was like, this is the coolest
thing in the world.
Even I think the first week I went up to my teacher and said, is there a way I could get
a job looking in the microscope?
She so happened to be a lab scientist, like a hospital lab scientist.
She was a microbiologist.
She was like, oh yeah, and introduced me to that whole world that I didn't even know existed.
Of course, this was in the late 90s or early 2000s.
There might have been Google or the internet, but I didn't really know about it then.
The internet was kind of like a joke when I was a teenager.
We would make fun of people that said they went on the internet because you would hear
these stories on like Jerry Springer Show or something about people meeting someone
on the internet and something happening with them.
We didn't really take it seriously as a tool that we could use to help our lives.
I didn't know anything about the lab until that moment and then the next semester I was
like, I'm out of nursing.
I have no interest in being a nurse.
I want to be a scientist.
So then I moved forward from there.
So where did that take you?
Then I heard you talking about this on Dr. Drew.
What was the moment that happened that turned you more towards the pathology side?
From there, I decided first they had a program at the school called Medical Lab Technologist
or MLT or Technician, which is when you get your blood taken, that's the person that does
your blood work at the lab.
I was first in that and then once I started getting towards two and three years, I was
at Camden County College.
It was just a local community college.
I thought like I could do this more.
I feel like I want more of this for some reason.
I'm almost done and I could do more.
So then I looked into Jefferson, which is where I went for cytotech.
I went over there, graduated there and got my bachelor's as a cytotech, which is there.
It was looking at cells under the microscope.
So we would look at pap smears and stuff.
It's a more specialized lab technician, so you got paid a little bit more too, which
was a bonus being a single mom and everything.
I got hired out of school at the hospital and worked there for a couple years.
I would go in every day wearing nice clothes and a white coat and I would sit at a cubicle
most of the day and just look at slides.
Then once in a while, I would go up on the floor and do needle biopsies.
Sometimes if someone has a mass or something in their thyroid, they'd stick a needle in
it and pull out some cells to look at it just because it's like a less invasive procedure
than getting surgery and getting cut open.
I would assist with those procedures too.
One day I was working sitting at my cubicle and I heard this huge commotion out in the
hallway and all these people.
We were all friends and I went out on the hallway and was like, what's up?
Everybody was freaking out because there was this horrible smell in the hallway.
I went out there and was investigating to see what it was because it just was the nasty,
this funky smell that I never smelled before.
It didn't smell like poop, it didn't smell like pee, it just was really nasty.
I obviously was curious what it was.
Went over around the block or around the wall to the pathology department and everyone said
that the leg refrigerator was broken and it was leaking.
I just said, what do you mean a leg refrigerator?
What's a leg refrigerator?
I look and it looks like a refrigerator that you would see at a pizza shop that would have
the sodas lined up in it and everything, but instead it had a bunch of amputated legs wrapped
up in biohazard bags.
I was kind of mind blown by that because I was working at the hospital for a couple years
already and had no idea that on the other side of my cubicle behind the wall was a refrigerator
that had amputated body parts in it.
That kind of was a little shocking to me and then I thought, well, what else is going on
back here?
I saw this whole world back there of just people sitting at stations with cutting boards
that just had giant organs sitting on them.
It looked like a kitchen, but not a kitchen.
I got so curious about that and then all of a sudden I got kind of bored with the microscope
stuff after going over there and seeing what was going on in that department.
That room that I walked into was called the gross room, which is where you look at gross
pathology, it's really called that actually, the gross room.
Anytime you get anything removed from your body in the hospital, it goes to that lab
to get examined.
I thought, okay, I need to come work over here now.
I laughed when I heard you telling that story.
The reason being, I grew up on a farm, my dad was a veterinary surgeon and he would
keep all kinds of things.
He'd bury it and just dig it up and get the bones for skeletons to study.
Other times it was pathology, but we had a fire in the horse hospital.
The firefighters had put it out and they'd done what they call overhauls.
They removed what they could salvage.
My brother, it was in the summer, had two friends on the farm with him and the fridge
was still sitting out unplugged outside this building for quite a long time.
As he walked by, he pulled the fridge open and the two friends behind him threw up.
When you were telling that story, I can envision everything, the smell and everything.
It's crazy because yesterday on my podcast, Mother Knows Death, we were talking about
a nursing home that... or not a nursing home, a funeral home that has recently been in the
news because they were promising these green burials with no chemicals or anything like
that, no embalming fluids.
Here they were taking money from people and taking the bodies and just stacking them up
in this warehouse type thing.
One of the neighbors smelled the warehouse and called police.
Police showed up and found 200 dead bodies stacked on top of each other, just decomposing.
I was thinking about how horrible the smell must have been.
You wouldn't have to be living right next door to smell that.
It would just permeate the air for such a long distance.
It's a very distinctive smell once you smelled it.
Yeah.
I actually wrote a book about three years ago.
One of the chapters was the last day, my last shift in Orange County, Florida.
This wasn't why I quit.
I think the gods just was like, really?
You're going to leave this department, all right?
Here's a day from hell.
The middle had multiple deaths, but one of the ones was a homeless woman that had been
missing for a few days, again, in the Florida summer now.
We got, I forget now how close, probably 200 meters towards where she was.
I told the rest of the crew, look, I'll go.
I was the medic that day.
I'll go check it out.
Yeah.
That smell is, like you said, you'll never forget it.
I got there and she was literally just, flesh was hanging on bone by that point.
She was black and putrid.
Again, no one needs to add that to their catalog, but yeah, it's something that sadly, I'm sure
a lot of people listening to this do know, but few will really understand.
But then to discover that your loved one was stacked in a warehouse and the emotional damage
that that must have done to a lot of people is horrendous.
Yeah.
That was my first thought.
I can't, especially because I know what that looks like.
I never, well, I was just going to say to you too, that was one of my first thoughts
when I went to the medical examiner's office and saw a really bad decomposed person with
maggots and stuff like Jesus, imagine finding like one of your family members looking like
this.
I just, because it's so, they don't even look human anymore.
It's just nuts.
Yeah.
I was actually a student paramedic and it was funny of you talking about raising a child
on your own.
I went through a divorce.
It was a single father, had no family in America whatsoever, working full time on a very, very
busy rescue in Florida, paramedic classroom, and then riding along with a completely different
fire department up here.
Not obviously not supported by my fire department in any way, shape or form.
But when I was riding with them, I was a full on black cloud.
All kinds of people died.
One of them was a guy that had been again, not heard from for a couple of days and it
was a Florida, it was a trailer.
There was no AC and yeah, I mean, just so swollen and bloated that if you just got a
pin, he would probably exploded.
And it's so sad, but I'm glad that we found them just like you said, that we found them
not someone who actually was a family member.
Because if that was their last memory of them, that would haunt them probably the rest of
their life.
Oh yeah.
I can imagine that.
So you find yourself going into the world of pathology.
As you start progressing through the years, were there any kind of aha moments or realizations
that you had as you were in that world now that you were kind of naive to before?
Yeah.
I mean, I had a lot of them.
I remember when, so after I decided I wanted to work over there, I went up to the doctor
who ran the entire pathology department and said, I want to leave this department and
go to surgical pathology.
And he tried to talk me out of it and said, you go to work every day and you wear a clean
coat and if you go work in surgical pathology, you're going to have to touch poop and blood
and it's really messy and you have to wear scrubs.
And I was like, yeah, I'm okay.
Sign me up.
So he let me just, I did like a lateral transfer and was working over there before I went to
PA school.
I did it backwards than most people would do.
And with the bachelor's degree, I was allowed to dissect certain organs with my level of
education.
And then while I was in PA school, I learned just a whole other level of anatomy and physiology
and pathology.
And I remember one day just sitting there, I was grossing an appendix and then everything
just clicked for me because there's a lot to be said about on the job trained experience
and this is something Gabe and I always talk about that you have to work in order to have
experience but you also have to be educated to put it all together as a package.
And once I got that formal extra education with anatomy and physiology, it just all of
it came together full circle and just clicked.
And I thought like, this is why I've been doing this this whole time.
Oh, okay.
This makes sense.
And then it just was so silly, but it clicked for me and then everything I was like, I know
everything now.
I just know everything, which obviously I don't know everything, but I kind of got the
full picture of why I was doing the job because prior to going to school, yeah, someone said
cut this up and put these certain sections through to show the pathologist, but I didn't
really know why I was doing it.
And once you know why you're doing it, you could know how to do anything because you
know the right questions to ask what the doctors are looking for when you're doing your dissections.
Something that I found as I progressed on the EMS side and the fire service, at first
you're learning the building blocks, the facts.
This is A through Z of this disease or this injury.
And then as you start getting more information, taking extra classes and then just seeing
more and more calls, you start to shift into the critical thinking phase where yes, those
are all in the back of your mind, but now you're actually being a lot more of a sleuth
and rather than just what they call a cookbook medic where you're just following your protocol,
you're actually able to critically think.
I think that's the next step in our path, our journeyman path of trying to become a
great paramedic.
And I never got there, I was 14 years in the fire service and transitioned out.
So I would not have the arrogance to say I ever reached any sort of pinnacle.
But it was a real shift when just like you said, all that knowledge kind of went into
a mixing bowl and your brain would just kind of spit out the right answers even without
you thinking about it because now you'd had enough ingredients to make good decisions.
Yeah.
I mean, and I saw that because I taught residents for years there afterwards and you could see
the difference between ones that got it and ones that didn't get it.
People just didn't understand how to put what they were learning in school to practical
work.
And that's the key to life with anything, with medicine, with firefighting.
It's the key is to put it all together.
Well, I want to dive into the world of pathology, but before we do, when did you meet Gabe?
I met Gabe when I was in PA school, my second year of PA school 2008.
Okay.
So now you have the world of pathology.
At Wawa.
Okay.
I jumped in then.
So please tell me more.
How was romance sparked in Wawa?
So I was on my way to the medical examiner's office actually in West Philly or one of my
West Philly rotations that we did the medical examiner and children's hospital in Penn were
all around there.
So we, my classmates and I were over in West Philly for a while and I was on my way to
pick up one of my classmates so we can go to West Philly.
And I decided that I was going to stop in Wawa really quick and get a coffee on my way
there.
And I went in and I saw Gabe in there and I didn't talk to, I would never talk to someone.
So I just acted cool and was getting my coffee and then he started talking to me and we ended
up talking outside of the Wawa for like an hour and a half or something crazy.
And the whole time my friend was like waiting for me to pick her up to bring her to school
and I just totally blew her off and didn't even, and she was late that day too.
So I didn't even tell her like, yo, I'm talking to this guy or whatever.
And I got in the car and picked her up and I just was so happy.
Like I just knew, I'm like the kind of person, I just knew that I was going to be with him
and from the very first day and she was happy.
She's like one of my best friends and she was happy for me.
So she wasn't mad that I totally blew her off that day.
That's so good to hear.
I just did a post.
My wife and I just hit 11 years of being together about a month ago.
And the reason I put the post was just to kind of instill some hope.
I was 38 when I met her, you know, and being, as I mentioned before, divorced, single dad,
et cetera, et cetera.
But when I met her, it was the same thing.
And ironically, it's a funny story.
We did them whole match.com thing and she said she was going to watch a band.
So I brought a friend along with me thinking she was already going out with some friends.
She wasn't.
The three of us went on our first date.
Oh my God, that's so funny.
But it was, but you know, we were talking and then basically I never stopped seeing
her after that.
So I love hearing that kind of love at first sight, you know, story because it does happen.
I think you just got to meet the right person at the right time in your life.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know if he would say the same thing.
It was rough.
It was rough with him for a couple of years, I think.
And that this is, this would be something that you would have to talk with him about.
But I was always, I would say that I was always on board with, with saying that.
And it took a while for us to get our groove, but it's, it's been just awesome.
Our 10th wedding anniversary is actually this weekend.
Beautiful.
Well, congratulations.
Thanks.
So you have this pathology route.
Gabe has obviously my route, first responder route, different kinds of trauma, different
kinds of exposure.
What have been your comparisons, not only just on the job, but also dealing with the
things that you see for a living?
I think, I think that we're able to understand each other on that respect because he sees
a lot of work that would go to the medical examiner's office and especially working in
the rescue company and the squad company.
They go to all sorts of car accidents, people jumping off the bridge, decomposed bodies
being found, people dying in fires.
So he sees a lot of the similar stuff that I've seen.
So we're able to talk about that all the time.
But it's just, there's a, there's just a lot to talk about because you're working,
you're all working at a place as a team to try to accomplish a task.
So there's a lot of similarities between, between that and really the task getting done
has to do with the people being trained well.
And also there's all other factors too, like having good work ethic and good camaraderie
between the people that work together and good morale at the institution that you're
working at.
So we, we talk about that kind of stuff all the time and we have a lot in common when
it comes to that.
And what about within your profession culturally?
Is there, is there a discussion of mental health, emotional health in the world of pathology?
No, I would say, I would say not, I mean, maybe there is now, I haven't worked at the
hospital full time in a couple of years, but no, it's not.
And especially I had a hard time dealing with that a little bit because when I was in PA
school, I had to spend a summer at the medical examiner's office and not only did the school
not really prepare me for what I was about to go see, but just being there, it, I couldn't
even imagine really working there the rest of my life because I thought it was so, it
was so sad and depressing.
Working in the hospital, I do autopsies on people all the time and some of them are young,
some of them are babies and some of them are a fetus.
Mom had a miscarriage, horrible situations, but I feel like all the ones that you do in
the hospital are medical and there's, that's kind of like a God, nothing you can do about
it kind of thing.
Whereas the medical examiner just, you just see like the most horrible parts of society
and what people do to each other and what people do to themselves.
And it, I could imagine that people that work in that particular field their whole life,
that might be a lot to deal with, but even in the hospital, I saw horrible, horrible
cases of just young people getting diagnosed with horrible cancer, like knowing that they're
going to die from this cancer and the autopsies, like I said, you would get a father of three
that was 40 years old that just died from some weird infection and he comes downstairs
and open up the body bag and he's like still wearing his Eagles t-shirt and you think like,
God, this guy could have been my husband or this guy could have been my brother or something,
you know, that sort of thing.
But we just kind of do it and block, block it all out.
That's all we do.
Well, we even do that within our profession.
And it's sad because this last year, 2023, I saw a lot of people struggling.
I think it's, you know, all the things, but also the ripple effects of the pandemic and
all the shutdowns and isolation.
But I swear to God, the theme of 2024 is back into firefighter cancer again.
When I had the wife of a firefighter and one of his brothers in his department had been
diagnosed with cancer and he was going to come on the show and, you know, we went back
and forth and he's like, yeah, I'm not feeling so good today.
And I just got a message the other day that he's in an induced coma and may or may not
come out of it now.
And this is probably someone younger than me, you know.
And so, you know, when we talk about, oh, it's the work of God.
There's nothing we can do about it.
Because sometime in God, you know, these poor infants that die of leukemia and those kind
of things, I think it's harder to find the origin and the cause.
But when you look at my profession, it's glaring what is killing a lot of our men and women.
We can't save them all, but the sleep deprivation and the carcinogens and all the other elements
that contribute to our ill health does steal first responder lives way, way sooner than
they should have gone.
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a huge fear I have with Gabe, obviously, just because I
know a lot about especially burning things and how the chemicals change when things are
burned and just them breathing it in all the time and hearing the horrible stories about
the first responders from 9-11.
And just I hear stories all the time about now their uniforms could be a problem and
the extinguishing materials can be a problem.
Anything can be a problem.
It's something that you guys not only risk your life just on an acute level, I would
say just going into a burning building, but also long term health effects that you don't
even know might pop up in 20 years from now.
Yeah, and even the shift work.
I think the World Health Organization and other groups are identifying it as a carcinogen,
you know, so this is the other side of the coin.
You've got these exposures, but then we're breaking down their immune system.
They're breaking down the ability to deal with these exposures as well.
So it's like a double edged sword.
Yeah.
And I mean, my husband's department works on 24 hours on and then three days off 24
hours on, but then they also have the opportunity for a 12 hour overtime shift in between that.
And yeah, I mean, there's nights that he comes home.
It's always the night before we're supposed to go on like a giant road trip where he's
supposed to drive 10 hours or something.
And he just comes home and he's like, I, you know, he wears that the whoop thing and he'll
just be like, look, like it registered that he took a half hour nap in a 24 hour period.
That's just, it's not good.
No, no, it's not.
And he's working the better schedule 24 72 is the what Northeast works.
The rest of the country, a lot of them work 24 48.
It's one less day between each of their shifts, which is insane.
Absolutely insane.
Yeah, it is.
And we have a funny thing in our house because we say, you know, he has three days off in
between his shifts.
So we're like day one, we don't bother daddy.
He's recovering from trying to catch up with sleep.
And then day two, we say like, that's, that's the best daddy day.
That's the best day to like, that's days I'll schedule us to do family events, dates, because
I know that he's had the best sleep and that's a great day.
And then day three is like, all right, daddy's got to go back to work tomorrow kind of, you
know, so even though he's off those three days, he's really on the middle day just on
a normal sleep schedule and everything like that.
Absolutely.
Well, as I've pointed out a lot recently, you know, each of each shift is three days
crushed together, three eight hour days crammed together.
So that day after the shift, we've actually worked from midnight through till whenever
he gets off seven, eight in the morning.
So it's not even a day off really.
After that middle day, like you said, that's the that's the golden day where they woken
up in their own bed and they don't have to get up early the next morning.
So I think that's why that shift should be, in my opinion, the industry standard at least,
if not give them even more time off.
Yeah.
And it's weird because people say like, oh, he only has to work two days a week.
And it's just like, yeah, but and it's not I wouldn't even say it's a 24 hour shift because
he goes in almost an hour early every day and then he stays late too.
He always has to stay late for waiting for relief or whatever.
So it's it sometimes ends up being even more than more than a 48 hour work week.
You know, absolutely.
Well, it's an interesting perspective.
And thank you for that.
When we talk about cancer, it's one of the things I wanted to kind of ask you about.
Now we're exploring the inside the body more often than not after someone has passed.
But it's such a unique perspective and something that I tried to glean as much knowledge when
I was a medic.
So did they make it?
You know, what else did you find?
What did the blood work show, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
We never obviously got the pathology postmortem results, but at least, you know, the nurses
and doctors after.
But now we get to go one more step.
One of the things that I really struggle to understand is the reliance or the only options
for cancer to be radiation and chemotherapy.
It seems to me that kind of Agent Orange, you know, just destroy everything and then
fingers crossed the body restarts again.
Blames a lot of lives.
Some people may have passed anyway.
Some people may have even, you know, changed the way they ate and did some other lifestyle
changes and maybe reverse some of their diseases.
What is your perspective seeing inside these bodies?
You see, you know, you see cancers and tumors themselves.
I'm sure you've done some of people that have chemo.
Has it given you any kind of unique perspective on the treatments that we traditionally use
for cancer?
Yeah, I mean, I, there's certain if.
So for example, my grandmom got diagnosed with gallbladder cancer and when she went
in to get her surgery and everything like that, they determined that she had stage three
gallbladder cancer and possibly even stage four.
Like it was, it was bad and from my perspective, it was, she was going to die from that.
And I was shocked when I went with her.
She wanted me to go to the oncology appointments and I went with her and they were like, oh,
we're going to try you on chemo and you're going to get, you're going to get really sick,
but it's, it's going to do this and it's going to do that.
And I remember going out to the car to my mom and saying, I don't think that she should
do that.
I think she should just be comfortable until she dies because I look at it like, I know
how these biliary cancers work.
They're very aggressive.
You're not getting rid of this.
And why do you want to feel like shit the last couple months of your life?
And so, but I said, and I kind of explained this to my grandmom and said, you could, it's
your life.
You could do what you want to do.
So she goes, well, how would I try it?
And then if I don't like it, I won't do it.
And she tried it and she was like deathly ill and was like, I will never put that into
my body again.
Like, let me just, let me just die in peace kind of, right.
And so from my perspective, I, there's certain cancers that I would say like, hell no.
Let me just, let me just, if you could surgically remove this or make me comfortable, give me
a stent or whatever.
So I'm not in acute pain, but let me just finish my life and go on with it.
But then I've seen other positive effects of it.
Like one of our, one of the coworkers at the hospital, her dad got diagnosed with stage
three colon cancer.
He had the tumor resected and then he got chemo and whatever chemo they gave him wasn't
that bad.
So he, he was able to go to work.
He was a little tired, but he never like lost his hair and wasn't nauseous all the time
and stuff.
And I mean, he's still alive and this has been almost 20 years later and got to live
a great life and see his grandkids grow and everything like that.
So I definitely think like chemo is just in that big lump of like the pharmaceutical company.
Let's just throw drugs on the problem instead of trying to just figure it out.
Like with my grandma, I just was mind blown that they were even trying to give her hope.
I guess at the same time though, if you're a person that has cancer, you don't want to
be told like, Hey, this is it for you.
You're dead, you know?
But I thought that they were kind of giving her false hope.
And my mom too, because my mom has two other sisters.
So we all went out to the car and I was like, mom, she's going to die from this.
Like you need to start being prepared for this.
Whereas my aunts were like, no, the oncology doctor said she has a chance.
And I'm like, she, no, she, I've never seen that, you know, what, what we see all the
time.
Um, so it's just for me, it's on like a case by case basis, according to what cancer you
have, you know?
Well, I believe, you know, again, like we were talking about children with diabetes,
I think, you know, a lot of these adult cancers are accelerated, initiated by environmental
elements.
I mean, I think if you look back, um, at more ancient humans, you know, I doubt a lot of
people 300 years ago were dropping dead of breast cancer, you know, women in their thirties
and forties.
So identifying whatever is, is increasing the likelihood of getting cancer is also an
important part of this conversation.
Yet it seems to be, you know, five Ks purple beads and you know, chemo.
So trying to unpack what is it that's creating so much disease, the same as we do in the
fire service, the carcinogens, asleep, et cetera, needs to be said as well with all
of these, you know, um, post mortems and, and, and insights that you have now, have
you noticed a correlation with a lot of the people that have cancer with other diseases
within their body or obesity or any element like that?
I will say that every single, every single time we would get an autopsy in the hospital,
the resident will come up to me and say like, Hey, we have an autopsy today.
And my first question is, are they obese?
Because it just, when you hear of a 56 year old person dying, it's usually, that's one
of the, that's one of the things that we would see all the time is obesity related stuff.
Not to say that we didn't get the 96 pound 80 year old lady that, that I could pick up
with my hands.
Like that happens too.
But the majority of people that I would see younger deaths, um, especially are, are due
to obesity.
Now believe it or not, we don't do a ton of autopsies on people that have cancer.
Um, not that I haven't done a lot of them, but it's not as common as you would think
because in most cases, if a person has stage four cancer and they're dying from that cancer,
they'll ask the family like, Hey, do you want to get an autopsy?
And the family says no, cause they know why they're, their family members dying.
So luckily I got to work in a, in an ed, an academic institution where we would be able
to sometimes ask the family if we could do the autopsy.
Cause the person had like a weird cancer or they wanted to look at how the treatment worked.
But, um, you just, you don't see a whole lot of it all the time because family members
are the ones that drive the autopsies in the hospital and they usually know why their family
members dead.
What about during the time where COVID was at its height?
Were you exposed to a lot of autopsies then?
No, I only did a few cause I only do weekend, like a per day thing now with autopsies.
I did a few when it was in that weird time period of, um, I would say after Christmas
2019 to, to St. Patrick's day, 2020, when it was like something weird's going on in
China, all these people, like the buzz happening.
And um, one of my friends actually, who's also a PA is from China and she just said,
like, I've been talking to my mom and my brother, like something's weird over there, you know,
just heads up.
And I did do an autopsy on someone right towards the, when the lockdowns were happening and
stuff that had like crazy looking lungs and everything.
And I was like, that's weird.
Um, and just, you know, no extra precautions or anything.
And then they shut down doing any autopsies like that for, for a while afterwards, unless
it was absolutely necessary, but they weren't doing them for, for months afterwards.
Cause that's another situation where even though it was kind of lauded as heresy, like
how dare you suggest that the reality was through a medical profession's eyes, that
it was an opportunistic disease that was killing people with preexisting medical conditions.
So again, when you bring back in obesity, diabetes, hypertension, that was a massive
precursor and arguably preventable element of human health.
Then when you add in this virus was causing death rather than survival.
Oh yeah.
I, I a hundred percent believe that.
I mean, I personally didn't see that doing autopsies just because like I said, they weren't,
they weren't being performed during that time, but I, I know that that is, that was one of
the things that you would say, okay, what are the comorbidities associated with this?
And not to say that there's not the, the one-off person here or there that seem was seemingly
like completely healthy, normal weight, prior awesome blood work, all that kind of stuff
that died from that infection.
But for the most part, yeah.
I mean, and also one of my things too, is that it's not even obesity.
Well obesity is definitely a comorbidity factor for COVID, but also cigarette smoking is too.
And they don't even, I don't even hear them ever talk about that on the news, that that
increases the risk of you having serious side effects of COVID so much.
And so if you took away the obesity and you took away the cigarette smoking, it would
be a nothing really, but nobody wants to address the real problems, you know?
No.
Well, I think what's so maddening and I've, when, when COVID here, I ended up putting
an extra episode a week and bringing on all these great minds, everyone from doctors and
nurses to strength and conditioning coaches and nutritionists, people that could give
actionable information, what people were told to stay at home and, you know, get fast food
delivered to their house and alcohol and watch Tiger King.
And not go to the gym either.
Exactly.
Cause it was closed and the beaches were closed.
And so now as we emerge, my thing has been, all right, you know, it was clearly never
about health.
And the reason I say that is not political because health of the nation is not politics.
It's you know, compassion and community.
We had a captive audience for two years where we could have put money back into PE programs,
got good food, you know, real food being served in schools, just like they used to removing
the soda machines, you know, pedestrianizing downtowns, giving incentives to local farmers
to grow clean food and all the things.
And none of that happened.
And now here we are in 2024 and the obesity epidemic's growing.
As you said, the, the diet, the childhood diabetes is increasing the mental health crisis,
the opioid epidemic.
And so one single disease gave us an opportunity to really address the health of the nation.
And what happened is, is it was politicized and the actual health of the nation, you know,
was secondary and nothing changed.
And here we are even worse off now than two years, excuse me, three years ago, which I
think is disgusting because we had the most amazing opportunity to really move the needle
on the nation's health.
Yeah.
And when you sit there and you think about, okay, when, why are these things increasing?
Diabetes, cancers in younger people, obesity.
I mean, just think about when you went to school, when you were a little kid, how many,
how many kids did you hear had diabetes?
How many kids did were obese?
Just think about that.
It was a long time ago.
So, exactly.
But I sit there and think like, well, what was, what happened in my childhood that's
different than, than my kid's childhood or what's their time period?
And it's like, my mom cooked dinner every single night.
And then once maybe twice a month on a Friday night, we would get either Chinese food or
pizza, like one pizza for our entire family, you know?
We drank water out of a faucet.
There was no such thing as bottled water, which that needs to be addressed because the
plastics with the food and with the drinks are an issue.
No matter what anybody says, I think that that's a big contributing factor.
And just the choices.
And now it's like, I could go on DoorDash and order from 150 different restaurants just
from my house.
It's so insane.
And I try to cook for, I cook for my family almost every single night of the week because
I'm trying to like bring it back and not using even pre-packaged stuff like cooking from
scratch and stuff for us.
And I pack my kids lunch.
So I like, fortunately I could do that every day, but it's just the over-processed foods
and the way that it's kind of being pushed on you like that.
It's nuts.
Yeah.
Well, and this is what I think we struggle with.
I mean, you see the end stage, you know, your husband sees the end stage.
I saw the end stage and I always remember comparing coaching in the gym, you know, where
I teach and being a paramedic, you know, when I coach, I try and stop people from getting
in the back of an ambulance, prolonging it at least when I'm in uniform, then you call
me when you're having your worst day, when it's almost too late or mostly too late for
people.
So, you know, there are certain professions that we see behind the curtain.
We see the reality.
You know, you can tell me that big is beautiful and, you know, any conversation about weight
loss is fat shaming.
Well, there's nothing beautiful about me sticking a tube down your throat when you're 42 years
old and trying to defibrillate you and then, you know, leaving you there for the coroner.
It's horrendous and you should have lived twice as long as you did.
So I think it's a powerful voice from your world, from my world to advocate like, you
know, we are literally killing our people.
You know, this I think 70% of Americans are either obese or overweight.
And you know, yeah, it's disgusting.
I was going to bring that up to the whole big is beautiful thing that pisses.
It pisses me off so bad.
And I'll never forget there was like this cover on the Cosmopolitan magazine and it
was like health at any size with a severely obese woman on the cover.
And I listen, I think there needs to be a different kind of view of just because a person
is obese, that doesn't mean that we should like say that their body shape is not attractive.
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about healthy, like visceral fat, the fat that covers your organs.
That's what I'm talking about is not healthy.
When you're when you gain weight, the more and more weight you gain, you not only get
fat on your belly, but when you cut someone open inside, if I could look at a person right
away, just the inside of their body and tell you if they're obese or not, because their
organs look more yellow because there's a lot more fat and think about your heart trying
to beat and then you putting a giant fat sweater around it like it just doesn't move as much
as it should.
And it doesn't work as well as it should.
And on top of that, you can get your your heart enlarges and there's just so many different
things that could go wrong as a result of obesity.
And I think it's completely irresponsible.
I just saw some TikTok video the other day of some doctor saying that it was completely
OK to be obese and people shouldn't say anything about it.
And I'm like, you you're you're sick for saying that shit.
You want to get these TikTok views and stuff.
And I'm like, it's it's so messed up.
And any person that works in EMS or in the hospital, pathology, whatever, you know that
that's not true.
It's and it's and it's crazy because so most of the morgues that I've either interned at
or worked at have especially the one that I worked at for so many years, like an old
school morgue made in the 1950s or whatever that had a gurney on it.
The autopsy table was for an average sized person.
Now every single new morgue that I've seen that's getting made has bariatric morgue tables
because people are getting bigger.
If you go into waiting rooms at doctor's offices, do you notice that they have these like extra
large, weird, wide chairs now?
They're not like normal chairs with the wheelchairs, too.
I mean, I always remember that, you know, when I first came to America, but certainly
as I progressed through my career, you put a normal person, I say normal.
I mean, the the size that they would be if they ate well and they were active on the
average hospital wheelchair almost looks like a comedy.
Looks like, you know, when people go on a on a road trip and they take a picture in
front of those those massive chairs, that's what it looks like.
And that's what's so sad is that's almost a standard wheelchair now.
And you know, I've had literally I've had patients that were basically a thousand pounds
that with the pancake on the bed that people revel at and some of these documentaries.
Now we a lot of us have had those over and over and over again.
And that was my biggest one.
But I've had, you know, multiple people that were five, six hundred pounds.
And when you come from a place of kindness and compassion, you're never going to shame
that person.
But your heart breaks, especially if it's a child, because you know that their lifespan
is being woefully shortened.
And that's why we're advocating for nutrition, for exercise.
You don't need to have a six pack.
You don't need to look like some 1980s muscle and fitness cover model.
You just simply need to be a healthy weight so that as you touched on your heart, your
lungs, your kidneys, they can all function properly.
And you can have whatever number of decades you were destined to have when you were firstborn.
Yeah, we I mean, I've had situations that the person was so big that I couldn't even
bring them into the autopsy room because the bed they were on wouldn't turn the corner.
And I had to cut someone in the refrigerator once because I couldn't bring them into the
autopsy room.
It was and I'm sitting there like I do feel bad for the patients, but I'm like, why are
they telling the patients it's OK that they're living like this?
It's just it's terrible.
I don't I mean, you could say this about a million other different things that's going
on in the world right now.
Like why is everything so goddamn backwards?
But I don't really know.
I don't really know what to what to say.
I just could say what I see from my perspective.
I mean, I get hate mail and nasty gram all the time saying that I don't I am idolizing
thinness and all this these buzzwords these people use and whatever.
Like I could just sit there and say, at least I know that that's what I see.
And that's that's really what I believe.
Yeah.
Well, we've been so programmed.
All of us in modern society, we have screens, you know, there are companies and I've talked
about it recently.
There are companies that I would argue are headed by sociopaths.
And the reason I say that is the only way that you can sleep at night knowing that your
cigarettes or your fast food or your soda or your pharmaceuticals, which are killing
literally millions of people around the world.
The only way you can sleep is you've got to be mentally unwell.
That's it.
You know, a normal person would not be able to see they'd be like, we can't sell these
anymore.
They're killing people.
You know, our opioids, our cigarettes, et cetera, et cetera.
But people are being bombarded just simply so that some people can become millionaires.
That's it.
And so we are swimming upstream.
So it's not anything other than trying to go back to how we lived 100 years ago.
But for all this, there was no chemicals on our food.
There were no hormones, antibiotics in our animals.
You know, the the the medicine that had lasted literally millennia was somewhat holistic.
And that's why acupuncture works, why chiropractic works.
That's why herbal medicine works.
Now we're seeing, you know, plant medicine fixing a lot of the mental health problems
in military and first responders.
So we have to really push back and go back to pretty much just 100 years ago, how our
grandparents were raised.
And there's so much wellness in that.
But if we, you know, turn our backs because we haven't even questioned the way that we
have been programmed through our screens, that you need this stuff and you need this
fast food and you're going to be a dancing model if you drink this can of Coke, then
you know, understand that you're part of the problem.
You know, if you're pushing against something that simply is going to improve the health
of the nation, you are part of the problem.
Yeah, I agree.
It's it's really disturbing to me, like that where things are going and that they're that
we're just not admitting like clearly this is the problem.
And it's you could say the same things about that.
It was like everyone seemed to care so much about all the people dying from covid.
But what about all the people that have been dying from cigarettes for years and years
and years?
And it's not just like lung cancer.
It's all of the comorbidities associated with a cardiovascular disease.
And I mean, just that alone, we've lost way, way more people from tobacco alone than than
covid ever.
Same with opioids and everything like that.
And it's just like funny how they just want to address certain issues and not other issues.
Yeah.
Well, just to underline it, how many news stations have that death ticker in the bottom
corner that was just turning over, turning over with the covid deaths?
Where's that now?
Where's that with the deaths on the road?
Exactly.
And that always annoyed the shit out of me, too, because I think like you you work as
in the EMS field, so you see dead people every single day of your life, probably.
Right.
And working in the hospital and pathology and the morgue, you people die every single
day at the hospital.
And it just but nobody really knows about that.
Like if I came home every day and was like, Mom, I saw six dead people today.
Then she'd be like, oh, wow, six people died at the hospital today.
I wouldn't thought that much.
And, you know, people it's not on normal people's minds.
So when they see all these deaths coming in, it freaks them out.
And you're like, you are aware that people die every day, right?
Like millions of people every single day all over the place.
Like it's happening.
Yeah.
Well, one of the funniest things and again, not funny, haha, but just just complete.
Scare mongering really was all the footage of, oh, there are patients in the hallways
waiting for beds.
I'm like, that's every fucking day.
Like this is not now you're paying attention.
You never seem to give a shit before.
And now if you go back to all the urban cities, there will still be paramedics and EMTs holding
the wall with stretchers trying to get their patient a bed.
So it fitted that narrative for a moment.
And then the moment they changed to something else, they were like, ah, yeah, we're good
now.
Doctors and nurses don't care about them anymore.
You know, you know, they're not heroes anymore in this building.
Fuck them.
Yeah, exactly.
So pickle.
And we officially scared the shit out of everyone.
Like all of the the negative health effects that just will happen from that with people
just not going to the doctor anymore and and everything.
It's just it's just terrible.
Absolutely.
Well, you became part of the solution, obviously, even your work in itself, but also you just
decided to actually start putting some things out online, which I think is amazing because
again, you're educating people on all the things from from the mental health and suicide
through to the diseases that we've discussed.
So what made you start your Instagram platform and then kind of lead me through the creation
of your the the gross room as well?
So I started I just was seeing these autopsies and they were they were just so cool.
I wanted to share my findings with with other people that might be equally as interested.
And I started a website that was like I heart autopsy dot com.
It was a blog and I was doing that for a little while.
And a couple of people like I would tell the doctors at the hospital to look at it and
stuff.
But how was I going to get anybody to look at my blog?
Right.
So then my husband, he suggested that I start making the post a little bit smaller and putting
them on Instagram.
And I didn't even know what Instagram was because I'm just kind of like anti social
media kind of person, believe it or not.
And but at the time, my daughter was 18.
So she was all about Instagram and she set up the account for me and showed me how to
do it.
And and then it just kind of started from there.
I got it was when Instagram was good and you could organically gain people based on their
interest and and they weren't showing you stuff you didn't want to see.
And so it just blew up from there because I was putting like hashtags and people would
just search things they were interested in.
And also it would there was like the Explorer page was for accounts that it wasn't for any
account.
It was for like ones that they would showcase kind of and people would find me through there.
And it just kind of blew up from there.
As you start presenting all these cases to people, when you look back now, what were
some of the most interesting cases that you worked on?
I think some of the most interesting cases that I post were definitely that got a lot
of attention were like the miscarriages and stuff.
I think that people because that's a big thing with women, especially because a lot of a
lot more women than you think have them, but nobody really talks about it a lot.
It's kind of embarrassing and well, it shouldn't be embarrassing, but they feel embarrassed.
And I think a lot of people were shocked by the volume of stuff I was saying that I was
getting in the lab all the time, multiple miscarriages a day.
It's happening to people all the time.
I specifically have like more of an interest in natural pathology because that's just natural
disease and death.
So I was showing a lot of that stuff and also forensic stuff too.
I have an interest in the gross findings with certain kinds of forensic cases.
So I just showed a bunch of those different kinds of cases and people like how...
I think a lot of times in the news you'll read, for example, I just did a really good
article on this former NFL player named Mike Williams.
He died from a tooth abscess that eventually caused him to have a brain abscess and he
died and he was like 36 years old.
And people read it and they say, oh my God, how did that happen?
And I like to write an article like not only how did that happen and how that could happen
to you, but what that looks like when we do an autopsy of someone that has a brain abscess.
I like to do like this...
Because I think a lot of times people have these questions about visuals and they wouldn't
really know what we would be looking for.
So this is what we look for and this is how we give this diagnosis and say this person
died.
So someone else just died.
Oh, it was some weight loss influencer just died at 35 years old and it said, oh, her
cause of death is cardiac arrest and I just get so annoyed by that because it's like,
oh really her heart stopped?
Like yeah, everybody's cause of death is cardiac arrest.
So I like to just discuss those kinds of things about like...
Because when a person that's not educated in this particular area is writing an article,
they don't really understand how a person dies and why cardiac arrest isn't a cause
of death.
So anyway, getting back to your question, I was doing that on Instagram for a while.
It was awesome, but my account got deleted a lot.
It was getting reported as like graphic material and I was able to plea my case to Instagram
all the time to restore my account.
But it recent...
Like during COVID, just things changed a lot because of the censorship stuff.
And I always kind of like pretty much stay away from COVID because I don't think it's
like the only thing happening in the world and the only thing happening in medicine because
it's not.
So I just am like, I'll leave that up to other people.
I don't care.
There's like a million other things going on with people's health besides COVID.
But things just got censored during that time period.
And I decided that I was going to start my own website called The Gross Room.
So I didn't have to worry about...
Because on Instagram, I couldn't show nipples.
So I couldn't even show like what breast cancer looks like on a person.
It's ridiculous.
Can't show penis, anus, vulva, like just huge things that pathology occurs in these organs.
And just I was limited by how much text I could put in a post.
Now I could write an article as long as I want with as many pictures as I want, as graphic
pictures as I want.
And I don't have somebody threatening me that they're going to take down my account.
And now Instagram's got to the point where I can't post anything that has to do with
hurting anyone or homicide.
I can't post anything that has to do with self harm or suicide.
And it's like, why can't we talk about this stuff?
This stuff is happening.
I'm not showing people glamorized getting murdered, but I'm showing what happens when
someone does get murdered and how maybe you could avoid that happening to you.
It's education.
It's not a sensationalism of murder.
Well, especially with the self harm.
Like you said, murder, that's someone else coming into your world and you may or may
not be able to prevent that.
But when it comes to the conversations on, like you said, self harm, cutting, addiction,
suicide, I've noticed that you have to do like stupid little asterisks and exclamation
marks in the word suicide.
And it's like, this is the very thing that we're trying to get people to talk about.
And you've literally created an environment where you've canceled any conversation on
mental health.
So I hope that Instagram eventually will start to loosen that back up again, because yeah,
we now know AI can create transcripts.
If someone's saying, oh, why don't you just kill yourself, clearly that's hate speech.
But if you're talking about suicide in an open, compassionate, community based way and
trying to educate people and open doors, that's a completely different thing.
But they just kind of tar with the same brush, which has created the complete opposite environment
of what we actually need, especially for our young people.
Yeah.
And in the gross room, when I write posts about suicide now, especially, they'll be members
of my group that will write like, I tried to kill myself a couple years ago, and this
is how I got help.
And then someone will say like, thank you for telling me that because I'm going through
that right now.
It's like an open forum of discussion, whereas social media right now is just complete, just
trolls.
It's just constant comments of people that would never say anything to you in real life,
never confront you, and just being like aggressive behind their screen or something.
And they don't even necessarily mean to put it towards you, but that's the environment
that's created on there now.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to be mindful of your time.
Now we've got 15 minutes left.
Before we go to where everyone can find all the things that you have out there, there's
a couple of things I want to pull out from what you said before, again, through a pathology
lens.
The first thing you talked about miscarriages.
Now I don't have data, but it seems like a lot of my men and women, my brothers and sisters
in uniform struggle with fertility and seem to struggle even with miscarriages too.
So firstly, are we seeing nationally an increase in that?
And have you even been exposed to any statistics when it comes to that?
I don't know statistic wise, and I can't say.
I think a lot of it is, again, you have all of these environmental factors that are different
now.
But just talking to real life, talking to someone like my mom.
My mom went through a couple of miscarriages before she had us, and she seems to think
that this has been going on a long time, but you just didn't talk about it back then.
It was a hush hush thing.
She would have killed my father if he told one of his friends that she had a miscarriage
kind of thing.
Whereas now you're saying one of your friends is saying his wife had a miscarriage.
A lot of it is just culturally, there's more awareness to it and more normalization of
it.
I don't know if there's anything else to it.
I've known a couple of women that I've worked with over the years that have gone for fertility
treatment, and some of them, I feel it was really valid.
They were really having a hard time for years getting pregnant.
Some of them, I was like, yo, you've been trying for six months.
Relax.
Because again, my mom is an example of someone that couldn't get pregnant for a couple years,
but she ended up naturally having three children and she had two miscarriages or something,
which she's okay with talking about now, by the way.
But yeah, so it could be a combination of environmental factors and stuff and just also
just awareness of it.
Now the other side of that, the kind of almost shame that comes with a loss, what did I do
wrong?
I think one of the conversations that seems to be lost is the body's incredible innate
ability to heal itself, innate ability to know when something is right and something
is wrong.
With some of these miscarried fetuses, did they more often not seem healthy or were you
ever able to find a reason why possibly they were aborted by the body?
Yeah, so I mean, that's what I always try to tell a mom that had a miscarriage is just,
this is like a good thing that this happened because your body most of the time does not
reject something that is good like that.
So it's rejecting this fetus because there's something wrong with this fetus and you don't
want to deal with having this fetus born into a baby that's going to have problems for the
rest of their life.
So it's like nature's way of getting rid of something that didn't go right.
And yes, most of the time they would say that a miscarried fetus is because of a genetic
anomaly, we do send, in some cases send the tissue for genetics to see if they could find
something.
And again, that only tests for X amount of genetic diseases, not every single genetic
disease that exists.
So just because it's negative doesn't mean that the fetus didn't have a genetic disease.
There are these like rare times too where there's something, the fetus is completely
healthy but there's something wrong with the placenta.
It didn't form right, a blood clot got behind the placenta.
But unfortunately, there's nothing that you can do to stop that, especially early on in
a pregnancy.
If someone starts having a clot behind their placenta when they're 10 weeks pregnant, I
mean, I don't even know how you would go in and fix that.
And it sucks because the baby's fine or the fetus is fine but the placenta is not.
But yeah, you see a whole bunch of different things.
We get late term miscarriages, 35 weeks and stuff.
It could have so many different factors to do with it.
Yeah, well, thank you.
I think that's an important perspective because for most people it's just quote unquote, a
natural abortion miscarriage.
But again, if we're not painting the picture that the body knows what it's doing, these
parents are left with, like I said, with guilt and shame, like, what did we do wrong?
It must have been the round of golf I played or whatever the hell it was, instead of trusting
the fact that as you said, the body will let you know.
When the baby's healthy, the body will go full term.
So give yourself some grace.
One other area, I don't know if you've been exposed to this, but when it comes to the
smart inside, sadly, when it comes to TBI, and this is more so for combat athletes and
also our military and some of the law enforcement, the CTE seems to be behind some of the acute
mental health struggles.
Have you come across any kind of autopsy where you found that the brain had been damaged
from some sort of trauma if you'd known the background of the individual?
Yeah, we used to do a lot.
We were associated with a neuro hospital, so we would do a lot of just brain only autopsies
for research and things like that.
I didn't specifically work on any cases of CTE, and especially I feel like in the past
10 years, it's been getting more and more recognition where it wasn't even a thing,
like when I was in PA school.
I didn't even learn about, well, I won't say that.
We learned about boxing trauma that we would see in boxers and dementia that you would
see in boxers, which is probably now what would be considered to be CTE, but that was
only 15 years ago I went to PA school or whatever.
It's a new and upcoming topic, and I think it's really, really important.
I actually vent with my husband about this all the time with these football players that
they're getting these, in my opinion, young kids that they're taking advantage of and
just throwing a lot of money at them and not caring what their life is going to be like
when they're in their 30s and retire from football, and they have severe brain damage.
CTE can cause you to go completely nuts at the end of your life and just psychosis and
not being a nice person to your family, dementia.
It's a lot to consider when you want to put yourself in a career where you know you're
getting repeated head trauma.
Absolutely.
Well, it's an important conversation.
I think if you watch the Aaron Hernandez documentary, I think they found that at the end of his,
and that was obviously a homicide.
Then Junior Sayers, I think, was another one.
It was a suicide, but he shot himself in the chest knowing that it was something in his
mind that was great in that.
We have a responsibility as parents, as coaches, as members of schools to minimize the impact.
You can have so many elements of a football game without constant head trauma, and the
same with our young martial artists too.
If you're going to become a fighter, at certainly some point, you're going to have to get hit
in the head, but what can we do to minimize that in the gym as well?
Then, again, our military, the practicing, the breaching.
Again, how can we look at that and minimize the amount of exposure the concussive force
are you going to get in uniform?
These are really, really important conversations.
Yeah, there was also a wrestler.
I think his name was Chris Benet.
Benoit.
Does that sound right?
Yeah, Benoit.
Yeah.
He killed his, I believe, his wife and his child.
Same thing.
They found that he potentially had CTE.
We actually just went to, over Christmas time, we went to Key West and we visited the Ernest
Hemingway house.
On the way home, we were watching a documentary about his life and everything.
I think that he had it too, honestly, because he had multiple situations where he had head
trauma from being first in the military, but then he was in a plane accident.
He had all of these different times that he had a traumatic brain injury.
Then, towards the end of his life, he was also an alcoholic, but aside from that, he
was having psychosis at the end of his life and hearing voices and things like that.
That was my first thought, was that he had CTE.
Yeah.
I think you combine possibly a rough childhood.
Now you have the precursor to mental health struggles, and then you add in CTE.
If you look at it one dimensionally, they're, oh, he was an addict.
He was an alcoholic.
He was violent, but what was causing that?
Unaddressed trauma, problems physiologically in the brain, all the things.
If it's just reported as he was a cold-blooded killer that murdered his family, again, we're
disregarding the lessons if we don't reverse engineer what happens in all these situations.
Agreed.
I know we're running out of time here.
Where can people find The Gross Room, find your Instagram profile, and your podcast as
well?
The Gross Room is thegrossroom.com.
That's pretty easy.
My website, I'm so proud of it.
It's a cool place that I would have liked to go to when I was learning about all of
this stuff.
I post every single day lots of cases, lots of articles, and just it's a great group of
people, and we all can have discussions on there normal, not Instagram-like.
That's my website.
My podcast is called Mother Knows Death, and I do that with my daughter.
That's where the Mother Knows Death comes from.
That Instagram is at Mother Knows Death.
What was the other thing you asked?
My actual Instagram account is my name, at Mrs. Underscore, and Jemi, A-N-G-E-M-I.
It was I Heart Autopsy when I started, but my account got deleted so many times.
I just had to keep coming up with different names for my account.
That's what it is, but that's my main Instagram account.
I still post on there every week, but the majority of my content goes into The Gross
Room now.
Beautiful.
Well, I want to say thank you so much.
It's been such an interesting conversation.
We're opposite ends of the chain of survival, as they call it.
Obviously, people have passed by the time they end up on a table in front of you, but
I think there's so much value, especially comparing the two professions.
I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous and coming on the Behind the Shield
podcast today.
Thanks for having me.
Have fun.