The circumstances in which we found Miss Carey were unpleasant.

She had been dead for just over a week by the time we were called out,

though how much of the smell came from a decomposing body

and how much it was from the house she had lived in was difficult to determine.

It was unclear how long she had been sitting on that damn sofa.

Though, the odd man she lived with thought that it might have been as much as five years.

She had eventually become too large to get off it.

Nevertheless, it was long enough for her to become part of the thing with the saws and her legs and buttocks

having opened and then closed around the material. Woman and Couch, one being for years on end

until she died on it.

Disturbingly, this wasn't the first time I,

or my fellow paramedics, had seen something like this,

but it was certainly the worst case.

The look of the house, the smell of it, the sight of a skin and the cloth of the couch merging together was such an overwhelming experience that at first none of us noticed her hair.

It had grown long over the years, cloned strands of it trapped between a back and the cushions.

As we levered her half the sofa, it grew tight, pulling her head back, and it was only then

that we realized that it too had worked its way in between the threads of the material. I assumed that it would come out of the good tug, but it was apparently worked well in.

When we pulled on miscarry, the hair stayed put and a scalp threatened to come away instead.

In the end, I grabbed a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut her loose.

The rest of the call-out was no easier.

We didn't have a body bag to fit her. The trolley barely took a weight and

he took a second team of paramedics and a few police officers to help us get her on it. The

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