Dr. Deirdre Amaro wanted to be a physician, but as she successfully worked her way through medical school and actually became a doctor, she learned something vital about herself: She hates suffering. And often, that’s what sick patients are doing. It’s even worse, she said, when the patient is a child.
“Suffering gets to me,” she said.
So Amaro changed the direction of her medical career. Utah’s chief medical examiner, who took the post in June, still gets to help people, but her patients are “no longer suffering.” And the help she provides remains focused on the living — the family and other loved ones who want answers and a measure of peace after someone they care about dies. The office also prioritizes learning from deaths so that future ones can be forestalled.
Sometimes, that degree of comfort is delayed, at times by many years. There’s little that’s more satisfying than identifying someone whose remains were a mystery, sometimes for decades, and reuniting their bodies with those who have searched and wondered what happened.