Heartbreak befell Yolanda Madyun last year when she learned her 55-year-old son, Atif, had been found dead in his home in North Providence. Months later, when she viewed his autopsy report, outrage compounded the hurt.
“That’s not my son,” she said aloud.
At the bottom of the first page of the autopsy report, Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Zhongxue Hua had begun listing his findings of his internal examination.
“Body Cavities: The organs are in their normal situs,” the report reads.
“When I read that sentence,” Yolanda Madyun says, “a piece of my heart and soul was snatched from me.”
Situs describes the positioning or orientation of organs in the body. Hua was reporting that her son’s heart, liver, and the rest were in their normal places.
Yolanda Madyun says that was impossible.
When Atif Madyun was about 5 years old, doctors diagnosed him with “situs inversus totalis” – meaning his organs were in abnormal positions.
“When you do an autopsy, you do that wide incision,” Yolanda Madyun said. “They cannot miss a person’s organs completely reversed – oh my God.”