Autopsy on old woman

Depends on several things, first and foremost: The laws of the place she died in.

Some states (US) require any death outside of a hospital setting (which nursing homes don't necessarily qualify for) to have an autopsy. Some states require only those with suspicions. Some states require other things. A little research in the locale of your story would go a long way. If the law demands it, then the family cannot stop it from happening.

If the state does not require an autopsy, the family can always request it--but then they're responsible for footing the bill. The family can also hire a different coroner to do a second autopsy.

Hope that helps.

In my situation - or should I say my granddad's as I'm not dead yet - he croaked at home and he hadn't seen his GP in well over three months so the coroner/Scottish equivalent of such said, "Autopsy him." But the person who was supposed to do it was on holiday for another week, by which time dear old Charlie would have been a bit ripe, so they just said, "Funeralise him." So there are rules, but also there's leeway if the people who are supposed to do the autopsy can't be bothered.

You might want to look for another drug for her to OD on. According to the PDR, a person can survive a 200X dosage of most blood pressure medications with little or no ill effect, and the attending would notice any signficant bp drop long before it became fatal.
Try nitro instead.

She's more likely to die from not taking her blood pressure medication.

You probably should contact a nursing home in the local where your book is set to find out their procedures. As an EMT, I've arrived at people's homes, someone is dead, call the emergency room and confirm (yeah, doc, the monitor is flat, flat, flat). Tell the police the person is dead, they call coroner, who asks what happens. Reasonable story (person's been sick for a while, no sign of violence) and the body goes to the funeral home. No problems. We can do the whole procedure in less than two hours.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

No autopsy in my state on elderly, unless police detect evidence of a crime, such as a break in, etc...

Depends on locale and also on surrounding events. If there have been more than the usual number or a couple of suspicious deaths recently, local officials might be a bit more thorough, checking all deaths, double-checking paperwork that they would ordinarily slide through.

We didn't want an autopsy performed on my grandmother. Too ghasty to think on. We wanted her to simply be laid to rest. She'd had a horrific fear of being cut open, even though she knew she'd be dead, and that would be that.

But, because she passed away in a elderly home, law dictated autopsy had to be performed to clarify that nothing criminal was involved in her passing.
We never bothered to check if this was the law, or the nursing home's way of protecting themselves. All decisions fell to my aunt, and she's a very amicable person.
*shrug*
I agree with the above posters. Do your homework; make some calls. Readers will call you on the floor if your facts don't jive. So will agents.

Kathie Freeman said:

You might want to look for another drug for her to OD on. According to the PDR, a person can survive a 200X dosage of most blood pressure medications with little or no ill effect, and the attending would notice any signficant bp drop long before it became fatal.
Try nitro instead.

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Kathie's right. Nitro would be better, and it doesn't take much of it to stop your heart. You can only store nitro for a very short period of time, though. The pills are teeny-tiny and extremely fragile, and once the bottle is opened, they begin to age, eventually crumbling, and losing their potency. Hiding a quantity of nitro could be relatively easy because they're so small, and if they break and become powder, it wouldn't make much difference to a person who intended to use them for suicide anyway. A couple things to think about are that she wouldn't be able to wrap them in a Kleenex. If they disintegrated or became crushed, she wouldn't be able to separate the powder from the fiber of the tissue (or even find them). A small scrap of folded paper would work, though. Think about what kind of bed she sleeps in, because hospital beds don't have box springs, so there's no slipping anything under the mattress. Also, she's not going to be able to hide them under her tongue while she pretends to take them.

My mom had a sudden stroke and died at home in Irving, Texas almost 20 years ago. We were told the law required an autopsy of any death that wasn't attended by a physician. (Her last doctor's appointment was 3 weeks before.) I don't know if that was state or local law.

If your setting is fictitious (i.e. a made-up town in New Hampshire) you can always invent a local law that requires an autopsy if you need one. If you want there to be no autopsy, find a state where it's not required.

DustySterling said:

Would an autopsy be done on a woman who dies in a nursing home in her late 80's? She's going to commit suicide by saving up blood pressure pills and taking them. Would they just assume it was old age, or do they cut everyone open?

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A mandated autopsy costs the state a bit of money so it varies by region whether there would be an autopsy or not. In many places an autopsy on a NH patient would depend upon the family and the local coroner. If anyone raises an objection then it gets done. Medications, depending upon the dosage and conditions are also poisons or drugs. Ultimately you can OD on just about anything...even oxygen.

Unless a cause of death can be determined from a preliminary examination or tox screen, a full autopsy is usually not necessary, unless legally required. If she were to overdose on anything, fatal levels of the drugs would show up on a tox screen, thus indicating a cause of death. Then again, if the case is iffy, it's pretty much at the discretion of the pathologist in charge.

There's several factors to consider: her family's wishes, the nursing home's agenda and or operating procedure, the state's laws, how/where she is found. BP meds aren't lethal unless you take hundreds of them. Elderly suicide usually is via pills but the woman must hide long enough for the pills to take effect before she's stomach pumped.

HeronW said:

Elderly suicide usually is via pills but the woman must hide long enough for the pills to take effect before she's stomach pumped.

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Not with nitro. I can't think of anything that would work faster, unless it was injected. And there wouldn't be anything left of it to pump up, since it dissolves under the tongue.