"There's somebody watching this programme today making plans for their weekend, and they're going to be in the mortuary on Friday morning."
It sounds like a threat but it's simply the grim reality of life, Kiwi pathologist Cynric Temple-Camp told The AM Show on Thursday.
For decades Dr Temple-Camp has been trying to figure out how people died. He detailed many of the strangest and most gruesome cases he's worked on in 2017 book The Cause of Death - and now he's penned a second volume, The Quick and the Dead, detailing the "scarcely believable ways people meet their demise".
Or in some cases, didn't.
"Being a pathologist I don't see patients - I see their biopsies and I see their bodies," he explained. "But I have to go and meet people who expected to die, but didn't... people who were put into the hospice to die, and through absolutely magnificent insights of doctors and really heroic surgery actually were taken out of the hospice, operated on and are alive today, 10 to 12 years later."
One such case is John Brash, who was hit by eight bullets from a machine gun during a night-time exercise at Waiouru.
"This is in the days where the rescue helicopter barely existed... and he lived. The guts of this man telling his story, about how you've just got to hold on and not give up, is just amazing."
AM Show host Duncan Garner asked how he survived.
"That is a mystery to me. I was in the army in Africa and I saw many gunshot wounds, and I never saw anybody hit by that number of bullets who had even the remotest chance of survival. He was lucky... It was just chance - the path they took, the way he was standing, the speed at which he was running, just got him through."
Dr Temple-Camp says in three decades as a pathologist, he's learned whether someone lives or dies is often purely down to the "flip of a coin".
"It is just life and chance... There's no way they can know that because life is just chance. We can control it to some degree, but when it happens you have no control over it."
As close as the line between life and death can get, Dr Temple-Camp says he's never seen the Hollywood cliche of a person declared dead waking up in the morgue.
"We do have one doctor who spent a good deal of time trying to resuscitate a patient who had rigor mortis, but I've never seen it the other way around where we've called somebody dead when they were actually alive."
Fascinated with death from a young age, Dr Temple-Camp said it's not always the easiest of topics to deal with - particularly when children are involved.
"I always feel a sense of sorrow when I go into a mortuary... Nobody wanted to be there. Generally, when they're there and I'm there, it's because it's been bad news... If I'm involved, the story is a sad one... If a child is lying in the mortuary, we have failed somewhere. Somebody has failed... they are always the hardest."
But he doesn't let that dull his sense of humour, displaying a keen self-awareness.
"Most people I meet at parties, when they see I'm a pathologist they flinch a bit as if I'm come to take them away down to the mortuary. I must say I feel the same about psychiatrists."
The Quick and the Dead is out now.
