Your Mid-Week Update for 03/03/21

I wonder how long a person can survive without their lower half.

Now, in order to measure that properly, we need to determine the circumstances under which this person lost their limbs. If it’s slow torture – like taking a bone saw to each leg and gagging them so their screams and cries don’t filter outside the storage room (colloquially named the “murder den”).

Side question: am I using “colloquially” properly? I feel like I’m not. But I also just… HATE English grammar. So much.

Anyways. If I were to use a bone saw to slowly remove a woman’s limbs, their death would be quite quick. Blood loss is imminent and their suffering would be great, but short. I don’t want short.

So, what other options are there?

I had a theory that if I could remove from the waist quickly enough, I could then place the person upright and use their bodyweight to hold all of their limbs together. This was not the case and they just leaked out all over the floor. Death was definitely slower than just hanging them from the ceiling and timing their exsanguination, but it still wasn’t stellar.

What if I added heat?

I had to get James’ help for this because I am strong but I’m not insane – I’m also 43 and not an idiot. This part of the experiment took a very long time (and two of my best rags because he bit clean through one and bled through another when they split their tongue. What a shame) but it was worth it to finally get an answer to my question.

We turned on the iron to its maximum – which we already know is more than hot enough to cauterize a wound – and got my thinnest saw. Clean cuts are a necessity for this kind of surgery. Between the two of us, we sliced and burned along the man’s torso, circling his middle until we’d cut through the center.

Like a melon.

Think of it like slicing a melon and wiping as you go to keep the juices from spilling out.

What we were left with was the upper half of a human body still pumping blood and showing brain activity. Poor lamb came in and out of consciousness throughout the whole ordeal. I imagine the pain was excruciating given the tears and rags they went through. But at the end of it all, they were still alive. The skin essentially puckered under itself as the flesh was burned so it closed itself off at the bottom. It was not a colour I’d ever seen on a human being before (almost burgundy with bits of white and green seeping out) which was actually really cool.

We kept him hydrated – though they threw up every few hours so it was difficult to keep up. They survived a day. Well, probably a day. When he left at the end of the night, they were alive. James and I took turns going to check on them, staying for a few hours at a time before trading places. Sometime between switching shifts the next night, they died.

This time, they didn’t die from blood loss, so I count it as an improvement. We talked about doing an autopsy to determine the actual cause of death but honestly, I’m an amateur mortician at best. My knowledge of anatomy is better than most, but I wouldn’t be able to properly diagnose his cause of death.

So, we decided to leave the body for the coroner a few cities over. A case like this would obviously make local news so it would be easy to keep track as their investigation ran on. I hope they can give us more information.

If you can’t learn from your missteps, what was the point?

As always, dear readers,

Stay Safe