EDMONTON – Anny Sauvageau has become one of Canada’s foremost authorities on hangings and death by asphyxiation – a clinical pursuit born of personal reasons.
“There was someone very close to me who died in this category,” she told The Canadian Press in an interview. Sauvageau will officially become Alberta’s new chief medical examiner on July 1.
“I needed to understand and that’s why I started researching this area. I needed to know ‘Did he suffer? How long does it take to die of that? Did he still have time to think?'”
Sauvageau (pronounced soh-vah-joe’) is literally rewriting the rules on how to classify and standardize the ways one dies from oxygen deprivation. Colleagues from around the world will gather in Portugal in September to sign off on them.
The reasons are scientific, she says, but the goal is very human for those who have lost a loved one.
“They need to know for closure,” she says. “They want to know if the person suffered – that’s their most important question.”
Sauvageau is replacing Graeme Dowling as the province’s top forensic pathologist. She’s taking over at a time when Alberta, like other regions, is desperate to find coroners. Calgary alone has lost three forensic pathologists in the last year. Three have since been hired, and Sauvageau wants to find three more to bring the total to 10.
On this day she sits in her office in a bunker complex south of the downtown. Packing boxes are stacked in the corner. Her uneaten lunch sits in a drawer. She answers a question and checks her watch. All the labs are busy, and in the room behind her eight more subjects await autopsy.
She likens modern-day recruiting to a reverse game of musical chairs where provinces, jurisdictions and countries are left scrambling in a poach-or-be-poached world.
“To hire someone is to steal them from someone else,” says Sauvageau. “I was stolen from Quebec and now I’m stealing people. That’s the way it is. There aren’t enough people for all the chairs.”
She came from Trois-Rivieres and went to medical school at McGill University in Montreal.
It wasn’t a foretold career path. She wasn’t the whiz kid who took instantly to dissecting frogs on high school biology lab tables. Instead, as her university application form lay before her, she couldn’t decide if she should be a lawyer or a chemical engineer or interpret insurance actuarial tables.
Then she got sick.
“I had trouble with my health that made me deal with doctors,” she says. “So I thought, ‘Why not?’ I saw their role and I liked the way they were dealing with their patients, so I decided to go into medicine.”
She was certified in anatomical pathology in 2002, then moved on to forensic pathology – the science of determining and explaining death in courtrooms for juries and in other legal proceedings.
“That’s my biggest strength, to make something that is very complex very simple.”
Her research is replete with published studies: an argument to not dismiss hangings as a possible method of homicide; a case for sharply lower estimates on auto-erotic deaths; examinations of how age, suspension and ligature types affect neck fractures,
Some of her unusual cases are highlighted in medical journals, like the one about man who killed himself by stabbing himself in the buttocks with a broken beer bottle, cutting his iliac artery.
There’s the woman who ate her pet cat and choked to death on the kidney. The cat’s intestines and strips of fur were found in the stomach.
And there’s the auto-erotic death of a 20-something man who tried to gain sexual pleasure while tying himself up nude in a bondage position under a boat, dying when his home-made breathing apparatus failed.
Sauvageau’s day-to-day work is precise and methodical: external examination of the body, the Y incision through the chest to examine the organs, taking fluid samples, and finally peeling back the scalp to expose the brain.
It can’t help but hit you on a personal level, she says – a reminder of the miracle and fragility of the flesh.
“I’m very conscious this is a machine and I cannot take it for granted. Yes, I can die at any point by bad luck, but I also have accountability to my own machine to put good food in, to have exercise and sleep.”
Visitors to her lab, she said, may come in squeamish but don’t leave that way.
Initially, they stand in the far corner of the room, but slowly they inch forward.
“By the end they’re almost nose to the organs because they find the human body is a fascinating machine,” she says.
“It’s not disgusting. It’s beautiful.”
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