Hello everyone
I`m not used to writing on online forums. As I`m well into my seventies, I suppose that is to be expected. Still, I have something I feel that I need to share. I fear you may be disappointed with the lack of resolution, but I perhaps you can offer some explanations for a curious old man.
I am, or was, a doctor. I worked as a general practitioner in a rural area in the Swedish Inland, the sparsely populated area quite remote from the more metropolitan coast. Most of my work concerned life, but as for any doctor I was also in charge of deaths.
The incident I`m about to describe happened some time ago. I was still a young man then and endowed with the vigor and confidence that is the purview of the very young and the very stupid.
I had received a phone call from the police. An old woman had been found dead in her cabin, and they wanted me to confirm her demise and to determine whether a forensic investigation, including an autopsy, was warranted.
I knew the woman well. She was a patient of mine named Alva, and though spry for her age she had what was then considered incurable breast cancer. Oncology was still in its infancy back in those days, and to tell the truth there was often very little we could do. I argued a little bit with the officer as I wasn’t overly interested in driving for 300 km just to confirm that the corpse of a cancer- riddled 87-year-old was indeed dead. My complaints fell on deaf ears.
I must have smoked an entire pack of cigarettes as I drove to the old cabin. An endless ocean of pines had given way as the voice of Olof Palme complaining the American bombings of children’s hospitals in Hanoi filled the car. This was before he was shot of course.
After almost four hours I finally reached Alvas cabin. I call it a cabin, but it was more properly a “Fäbod”- a temporary lodging for herders to stay in while the herd grazed in the highlands during the summer months. They are quite common in the northern parts of Scandinavia. The herders were usually young women, “Vallkullor”, that stayed there alone for weeks to months. Alva had worked there in her distant youth, I recalled, though it was difficult to picture her as ever having been young.
Alva didn’t live in the cabin, she lived in a house in a village not very far from my surgery. Besides her macular degeneration and moderate cataracts she had been experiencing severe vertigo and mild ataxia, likely due to a paraneoplastic autoimmune cerebellar dysfunction- in layman’s terms she was woefully ill- equipped to drive a car. What had possessed her to visit her decaying cabin despite her ever-worsening condition was quite beyond me to fathom at the time.
It isn’t anymore. Age and suffering has ever been the mother of wisdom.
The cabin, for I will refer to it as such from this point forward, was a so called “Härbre”- a two story log cabin raised three feet from the ground by thick vertically positioned logs. It was painted with red paint from the Great Copper Mountain of Falun, albeit the coat of paint was fraying badly. There were no windows, and a single door on was placed on the south- facing wall. It was adorned with sun- bleached moose horns and on the wall next to it the dried head of a pike gaped impotently from the rusted iron nail that bound it to the cabin.
It had not been in use since the early twentieth century, or perhaps the late nineteenth century. Queen Victoria would have ruled over a third of humanity at the time. Adolf Hitler would have been a child, or perhaps a very young man crying at his dying mother’s bedside. The Wright brothers were likely busy repairing bicycles in their workshop. But I digress.
Two cars stood next to the cabin. Alvas small Volkswagen and a police car. The policeman, a tall and stoutly built middle aged man nodded and shook my hand as I approached. He was the stoic, silent sort so common in the Inland, but even then, his expression betrayed a hint of discomfort.
“She`s in there” he murmured and pointed at the cabin “She`s on the floor. There`s a hole in her left breast”
“She has breast cancer” I retorted “It isn’t uncommon for it to ulcerate” I hadn’t seen any such ulceration at her last check- up, but such things can develop quickly. With the policeman by my side, I went into the cabin.
The stench was abysmal, but nothing I`m not used. Rotting flesh stinks, but the olfactory system will adapt to almost any smell in a matter of minutes. It brought me fond memories of my time in medical school.
Alva was on the floor, lying prone on her back and staring at the ceiling with glassy eyes.
“I pulled her shirt down. For modesty” the policeman said “It was pulled over her head”
I tested her corneal reflex, and confirmed the absence of a heartbeat and breathing. “What time is it?”
“18.05”
“Death confirmed at 18.05. Please write that down! I am going to examine her further to determine probable cause of death. I will need to remove her clothes. Please give me a hand”
We stripped her naked. Curiously there was no sign of livor mortis, the purplish discoloration caused by blood pooling in the lowermost part of a corpse after cessation of circulation. As we pulled of the shirt, a large approximately circular wound in her left breast was revealed. It was perhaps 4 inches in diameter with slightly irregular edges. It was dry, without a hint of blood. The skin next to the wound was healthy, as was the yellowish adipose and pale atrophied glandular tissue of her breast. The tumor, a hard lump the size of a grape, could be felt in an axillary direction and not immediately adjacent to the wound. Posteromedially, in the deepest recesses of the wound, I found a muscular vessel- an artery, which I determined to be Arteria thoracica interna, the internal thoracic artery. It appeared to have been severed, its ends grossly macerated.
“This was not caused by the tumor” I declared, almost peripatetically “But I`m not sure what could have caused it. It almost look like bite- marks, but they`re far too tiny”. I palpated the wound further with my fingers and to my surprise came upon something hard and smooth. I carefully picked it up and found myself holding a human tooth- more precisely a deciduous one. A milk tooth. I said nothing to my uniformed companion, nor did he offer any comment. We were in that moment, I think, strange compatriots of the uncanny. Further investigation did little to soothe our growing unease as I found several more small teeth within the wound, putting them on the floorboard next to me in a morbid line of white enamel.
“There is something else upstairs” The policeman said. We left the body and climbed up the ladder to the second floor. It wasn’t furnished, but a floorboard had been pried loose and in the space under it stood a rough- hewn wooden box, perhaps 2 feet long, one foot wide and one foot deep. The box was mostly empty albeit there were dark stains at the bottom and yellowish flakes that looked almost like dried skin.
I didn’t know what to make of it, but in truth I didn’t need to.
“Have you found anything on her body that may have been retrieved from the box?”
“No”
I shrugged
“No matter. Please let the medical examiner know she needs an autopsy. I don’t know what caused the wound, and it warrants further investigation”
With that I left the eerie scene. I never learned how the investigation proceeded. The newspapers reported nothing, and when I tried contacting the policeman, he merely said it had been handed up the chain of command far enough that he didn’t know who could be handling it. I didn’t inquire further.
I did keep one of the teeth though. Teeth are marvelous things in that DNA can be preserved in them for millennia. We didn’t know about DNA back then of course, but we do now and I still have contacts. I had it sequenced and compared to DNA from an old biopsy from Alvas tumor, kept in a government biobank for all this time.
They were a partial match, with the results being consistent with the teeth coming from a first degree relative of Alva. A sibling, parent or child.
I don’t know what happened there all those decades ago. It haunts me. I`m retired now and though I have little time left I often feel I also have nothing but time. If any of you has a hypothesis, I would be eager to hear. They say anything can be found on the internet after all, sometimes even the truth.