Obesity: The Post Mortem Page #6

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[Meg] My motivation to now

tackle my weight and to try and

reach a healthier weight

is because I have now recovered

from my binge-eating disorder.

It is a shame that it had to get this bad

for me, you know, to get to this point,

but I did need to access that

psychological health first in my case

You know, I have now seen the limits that

being overweight has put on my life

and I want to reverse those

and get back out there and

just live life to the full.

[Chanel] I am quite conscious these days

of what I eat.

I do go to the gym.

I do what I can to lose weight

or at least maintain it even if

I cant lose it drastically.

[photographer] Okay,

turn a little bit.

I am a plus-size style beauty

and lifestyle blogger.

People do get inspired

by those sort of things

so I think it is quite useful for me

to kind of get out there.

It actually helps me boost my confidence.

-Perfect. Yep.

-[shutter clicks]

Exercise is not my best friend.

Its quite a chore for me in a sense.

But I feel that in life with a lot

of things, youve just go to,

you know, make the effort to do things

that you dont necessarily love.

[Joey] In January,

I decided to join a running club

called Too Fat to Run and it was really,

really scary at first.

I went out and I ran for like ten minutes,

which doesnt sound long,

but when you havent run

and then you suddenly you can run

for ten minutes, you are like,

"Oh, crap, I can do that.

That was kind of cool."

Then I did my first 5K race.

Finishing a race feels

so much better than...

I dont know, it sounds really, really

cheesy, but it feels so much better

than finishing a pack of crisps.

Every race I do, I cant believe

that I have finished it.

[Vinette] Next, Carla will remove

the final group of organs.

But even in the last stages

of the post-mortem,

she takes nothing for granted.

People who donate their bodies to

medical science really are giving a gift.

It is the gift that keeps on

giving actually,

because as a patient I think we all would

prefer that our doctors and our surgeons

have learned on something realistic

to their job

before they are let loose

on a human patient.

You wouldnt really let a mechanic

take care of your car

if he had never touched an engine.

And it is very much

the same thing with this.

Real bodies are very unpredictable

and very chaotic

compared to anything fake, you know,

anything like virtual reality

or a fake cadaver.

Because if you look here, what

you should be able to see are the kidneys.

Granted, they always have

a tiny capsule of fat around them,

a bit like a sort of edamame

bean that you can pop out.

But these fatty capsules are

very, very large,

so all you can really see at this point is

a kind of yellow glistening mess.

So this again is indicative of the fact

that she has an awful lot of extra fat

around her organs.

So I am just slicing through the

fibrous tissues and the bits of muscle

that are keeping the kidneys attached

to the spine.

And it is really exactly the same thing

as I have been doing

with the rest of the organs

and that is releasing them from the spine

which is what anchors them in place

and then I can just reflect them all

the way down and pull them out

and this is the genito-urinary block.

And this is at least slightly smaller,

slightly easier to manage

because you have only got

the kidneys in this...

There is so much fat. It's just...

[Vinette] Mike needs to dissect the

kidneys to find out just how much damage

has been caused by all that excess fat.

[Mike] This is the right kidney,

this is the left kidney

and this in the middle is the big

blood vessel that carries blood

all the way down the body

and the most important and the

first thing I can see is,

theres an unusual amount of fat

around these kidneys.

Now the kidneys always

have fat around them.

The kidneys they are

not protected by bone,

which means that they can be bashed

and they can be hit

if you walk into something or something

hits you, so this fat protects them,

but this lady has much, much more fat

than I would expect.

What I am going to do first

is just cut through this fat,

which is called the perirenal fat.

And you can see quite clearly how

much fat there really is.

In a thin person, this would probably be

a half or a third as thick as

I can see here.

This is bad news for this lady,

as it means that she is more likely

to have the complications of obesity

because of the way

she is carrying the fat.

This pale area here is the kidney.

I am just going to cut into the kidney.

So the kidney has got a thick capsule

around it.

Now there is a small amount

of fat in the middle of the kidney

that is completely normal. That is where

basically the kidney is responsible for

filtering your blood and making the urine.

That urine has to go somewhere

so your kidneys got a funnel

that collects all the urine

from all the bits of the kidney,

takes it down through your urethra

into the bladder

and then when you want to go to the loo,

it goes out.

So this bit of fat sits around that

funnel area and is quite normal.

I am going to take the thick capsule

off of the kidney surface

to see what the surface of the kidney

looks like.

The surface of the kidney ideally

should be very, very smooth.

This kidney has got some

scarring on the surface.

Theres areas of indentation

and pock marking

and there is clear damage to this kidney

which would be associated

with high blood pressure.

And we know this lady had high

blood pressure,

which is what led to the changes within

her heart and which led to her death.

[Vinette] The visible scarring

and pock marking

weve discovered on our donors kidneys

are the last of the revelations

she will yield

before Carla completes the post-mortem

and closes the body forever.

When Mike has finished his examination,

I then begin the reconstruction

and in a way that is one of the most

important parts of the post-mortem.

What I do is place all of the organs

into a special viscera bag,

which will contain all of the elements

that we have removed

in the different blocks

and I place that into the body cavity.

And then I use very heavy post-mortem

twine to stitch as neatly as I can

right along the incision that I made and

we describe this as a baseball stitch.

It does look very much

like a zig-zaggy stitch.

[Vinette] Each post-mortem is unique

and everything they reveal valuable.

This donors gift was an opportunity

for Mike and Carla

to unveil the shocking truths

hidden inside one body

irreversibly damaged by too much fat.

The evisceration occurred

and it wasnt as easy to do

as it would be with a slightly

smaller patient.

It takes a lot more strength to cut

through this yellow adipose tissue,

which kind of blooms out of the abdomen

in this practically neon yellow

and it looks very much like butter

and it has a greasy feel

and it makes you suddenly very aware

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