As time passes, that eternally sleeping beauty will undergo some drastic changes, and one day it will change into a corpse. Here's how your body might change after a year of eternal beauty sleep. Death waits for no one, and it certainly won't wait for a corpse to get gussied up before your body starts to break down.
The first organ to go is your brain. After spending its whole life trying to keep the rest of you alive, in death your brain does the same thing in much more dramatic fashion. As detailed in What We Leave Behind , after four minutes of oxygen deprivation, your brain cells will break themselves down in a process called autolysis.
Per Scientific American , that breakdown results from one of the very processes that once kept your cells alive: breathing. Breathing produces carbon dioxide, which is acidic. During autolysis, that carbon dioxide ruptures your cells, which in turn release nutrients that other cells can use. The area where blood settles develops a red-brown color, also called the " post-mortem stain.
A bad odor begins two to three days post-mortem, in a process known as putrefaction. It's caused by micro-organisms in the intestines. These organisms do not expire at the same time as the body. Instead, they begin eating through the intestines. After a few days, micro-organisms spread across the thighs and stomach. The process of putrefaction eventually causes a foul odor, similar to the scent of rotten eggs and methane. Other side effects include a protruding tongue, a greenish patch on the belly, and fluid oozing from the mouth and nostrils.
Contrary to popular belief, fingernails and hair do not continue to grow post-mortem. They only appear to do so, as when the skin dries out, hair and fingernails can look more prominent by comparison.
Hair, while it may appear longer, actually starts falling out fairly quickly. Similarly, as the skin recedes , both fingernails and toenails only appear to look longer. Typically, by the time putrefaction occurs, someone will have stepped in to take the body to a funeral home. If the body is embalmed , this can slow the decomposition process, but it does not prevent decay.
A funeral director will first bathe the body. You see, when your heart stops beating, it halts blood flow, which is supposed to transport oxygen to your organs and tissues. So without blood, the most active, oxygen-guzzling organs and tissues go first. And the results are Without oxygen to keep them alive, the cells self-destruct, spilling all that fluid onto the coffin floor. By that night, an even more troubling process begins in the gut. Your dying immune system can no longer contain the trillions of hungry microbes that normally help digest the food you eat.
So they escape. First, they travel from the lower intestines through your tissues, veins, and arteries. Within hours, they reach your liver and gallbladder, which contain a yellow-green bile meant for breaking down fat when you're alive. But after the microbes are through eating those organs, that bile starts to flood the body, staining it a yellow-green. This can take anywhere from 1 month to several years, depending on the environment, burial, etc. You may be wondering: will a skeleton also decompose?
The answer is yes. If animals do not destroy or move the bones, skeletons normally take around 20 years to dissolve in fertile soil. However, in sand or neutral soil, skeletons can remain intact for hundreds of years. Although human decomposition is a natural process, cleaning up a decomposing body presents health hazards to everybody around it and should be left to professionals.
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