No avoiding the point

Thanks to modern embalming methods, most people don’t have to worry about one of the most dreaded fates since ancient times: being buried alive.

That’s simply because no one can survive embalming.  Draining all the blood from your body and replacing it with perfumed formaldehyde offers 100% insurance against living burial. However, mistakes are occasionally made:

A Colombian woman declared dead of a heart attack moved one of her arms just as an undertaker was about to embalm her, doctors said today.

I like to hope I would move too. Especially if they were about to stab me with a damned trocar.

(The moral lesson is that sooner or later, we all get the point.  Get the point! Hah! As Senator Claghorn used to say, “That’s a joke son!”)

Anyway, the woman is not expected to live long.

She survived for about 10 hours on life support, but then seemingly didn’t respond to resuscitation efforts following a second attack. She was declared dead early yesterday. About two hours later, funeral home employee Jaime Aullon was just about to inject embalming fluid into Serna’s left leg when he saw her move. “She was moving her right arm,” he said. “I stopped the procedure and brought her back to the hospital to be treated.”

What would have happened to her is explained here in more detail than you could possibly want.

Colombia, btw, has had compulsory national health insurance since 1993.

The general principles of the law determine that the healthcare is a public service, which must be granted in conditions of proficiency, universality, social solidarity and participation. The article 153 of the law determines that the health insurance must be compulsory, the health providers must have administrative autonomy, and the health users must have free choice of health provider.

Sounds very equitable. It isn’t working out too well, though:

The health professionals had little or no participation in the development of the reform to the healthcare system. So, basic principles such as cost-benefit, healthcare quality, and implications in the professional health practice were misjudged. The reform of the health system restricted severely the opportunity of the health professionals to hire their services privately, phenomenon that caused a heavy loss of income for the average health practice.

Not to worry. Under Obamacare, we’ll not only have death panels, but no matter how inefficient they are at declaring people dead, we won’t have to worry about premature burial because embalming provides the final safety net. The final solution, if you will.

And if you haven’t been embalmed yet, but just want to have that funeral parlor smell,  there’s a lovely fragrance for sale called “Embalming Fluid Perfume Oil“:

This scent is brought to you by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab: the world’s most decadent perfume house. Our perfumes are inspired by a vast range of influences, from the passion of the Fin de Siècle movement to the ghastliest of Lovecraftian monstrosities, we specialize in eliciting emotional responses through perfume and creating unique, masterfully molded scent environments that capture legends and folklore, poetry, and the stuff of dreams and nightmares. Though we are at times campy, and sometimes very tongue-in-cheek, we never lose sight of our one true goal: moving the soul and spirit through the unbridled artistry of scent, and remaining unbound by conventional fashion.

To go with the fragrance, you could get a nice set of trocar earrings!

Not that I’d recommend the above as Mother’s Day gifts, but whatever…