Ashley Fantz
speaker
73 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Ashley Fantz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I tried to get Vanderbilt to talk to me about this, and they essentially, I mean, they all but gave me the bird. I mean, they were like, we're not going to talk to you. So I was really outraged about that. I thought Vanderbilt would do better, but apparently not. Wow. You know, a lot of medical schools just don't have guardrails.
Well, Americans love capitalism. Yeah. Yes, this is true. So, I mean, I don't think whether or not you're poor or how much money you have, it really doesn't dictate whether or not your body is likelier to be
bought and sold what are your wishes would you donate your body to science after this or what what's the plan before i got asked to report right and host this podcast i was before my surgery i was taking care of final plans for myself even though like i believed that i was going to be okay i was just you know when you have a daughter or a kid you just have to get your stuff together
So I thought about donating my body. Now, I definitely wouldn't donate it to just anyone. There's a doctor at the University of Miami who is in the last episode of the podcast, and I think I would heavily consult with him because he's sort of a leader in the U.S. To advocate that donated bodies are treated with respect at the University of Miami, they're given a second funeral.
They are used for the purposes of... educating the medical students he took me on a tour of the donated bodies but they remained in the tanks it's like this isn't show and tell that's disrespectful to these people who have given a final gift so that we can teach future doctors that's the way it should be done now It's not done like that most of the time.
In fact, the business card that he handed to me had a unicorn on it. And I said, oh, wow. And he goes, because I'm a unicorn. I'm a unicorn in this field. Most people don't care.
I honestly don't know. Vanessa, I think since I survived, I kind of decided to stop. It was so overwhelming to me to think about it all the time that I've kind of stopped thinking about it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I have a will. I have all of that written out. I just, it's interesting you're asking me that because I haven't fully decided what I'd want. What about you?
I do always like to joke that I want like a mausoleum and it's sort of like that movie Big with the Voltan, you know, like talking thing. I want like a mausoleum where my likeness is sort of like a Madame Tussauds kind of, and I just tell you the story of my life. You put a quarter in me and I'm just like, yeah. It's kind of elaborate.
I think just getting more comfortable with death for me was a positive takeaway and learning more about the history of the advent of the modern American funeral home. And so asking these questions to me is interesting. Why is it that we hand over our dead? I mean, Of course, it's understandable. We don't just want to start burying people in our backyards. There's a hygiene issue there.
But why is it as a culture that we just hand over our bodies to a business that then charges us an unjustifiable amount of money to care for our dead? Why do we not want to see it? Why do we not want to confront it? And so I think if there's a positive thing that comes out of it is just start asking yourself those questions and not to be afraid of it.
I mean, it's totally normal to be afraid of death. I feel like everybody kind of is. But it made me a little bit more comfortable with it. A friend of mine who is from India, when her father died, she had to stand in line with his body as she marched toward a pyre. And she had to watch her father's body be thrown into the pyre. And
Once he was cremated that way, she had to sift through the ashes herself. Now, she's very much an American, and that made her sick to her stomach and traumatized her and the whole thing. But it's interesting to think about the way other cultures handle death and handle saying goodbye to the body.
Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
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