Featured Image Credit: Instagram/hospicenursejulie
Topics: Health, Social Media, YouTube
Joshua Nair
A hospice nurse has clarified a number of things that happen to your body after death, and they're quite gross.
Julie McFadden is known for sharing her health insights into end-of-life care and death on social media, having previously revealed aspects such as the 'first stage of death' and the most common regrets from those on their deathbeds.
But now, she's got into the 'messy' processes that happens to your body after you die, with a new video on YouTube that has accumulated over 579,000 views, outlining the health processes that take place.
The end-of-life expert explained: "It (the body) relaxes, like I've been saying - hence why people urinate, have bowel movements, sometimes have fluid come up their nose or out of their eyes or nose, ear...
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"I mean all of the things in your body that are holding fluids in relax. That's why death can be messy sometimes," she highlighted.
Known for raising awareness of end-of-life care and death, with a goal to remove the stigma around talking about it, she urged people to discuss the matter so that people aren't shocked when it happened.
McFadden said: "I like to talk about it so people aren't surprised if that happens. Very normal and to be expected sometimes."
After seeing her fair share of dead bodies, she had come to the conclusion that 'people's bodies are different' in this sense.
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"Some people start getting cooler immediately, some people take a while maybe an hour - it just depends," she explained, adding that you should see a one and a half degree Fahrenheit drop each hour.
This can happen as gravity pulls the blood downward, which is why you must move quickly to ensure that the body is not lying there for long.
The colour change can be seen on the back of their legs, as McFadden adds that 'the whole backside of them will look purple or darker' because of this.
Widely known as rigor mortis, the stiffening of the body starts within just an hour or two after death.
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"Rigor mortis, or the stiffening of the body, usually takes place within one to two
hours after death, and then worsens and then loosens over the next 24 to 30 hours," she highlighted.
This happens because the body's metabolism stops, which halts the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a nucleotide essential for cellular energy.
Hospice nurse Julie pointed out that a dead body will gradually become heavier, making it hard to carry and clean them on your own, with extra help often required - speaking from her own experience.
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She did reveal that the tissue eventually relaxes and the stiffness goes, but Julie said that the body is usually in the mortuary by this point, as the family decides on the type of funeral they want.