Just saw a death

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Livingapparatus

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Well I am at work and was doing my own thing and about an hour ago I delivered some versed to the ICU and saw this woman in the bed. I have never seen someone in so much pain, and the fact that this med that I had in my hand could help her so much made me feel good in my own way.

Then all of a sudden she started crashing. I step out of the way and end up watching (why? im not sure). Ten minutes later shes gone. This poor woman was "fine" probably 6 hours ago and bam shes out. No family there just her. Well I am just venting a little.

I have to say I feel a bit weird. This is the first time I have seen someone go in person and man its crazy.
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atleast your first...wasnt a ped..now that sucked
 
Livingapparatus said:
Well I am at work and was doing my own thing and about an hour ago I delivered some versed to the ICU and saw this woman in the bed. I have never seen someone in so much pain, and the fact that this med that I had in my hand could help her so much made me feel good in my own way.

Then all of a sudden she started crashing. I step out of the way and end up watching (why? im not sure). Ten minutes later shes gone. This poor woman was "fine" probably 6 hours ago and bam shes out. No family there just her. Well I am just venting a little.

I have to say I feel a bit weird. This is the first time I have seen someone go in person and man its crazy.
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damn man, that must have been a crazy experience... standing there being unable to do anything while you watch the doctors try their best... I've never experienced death in front of me :(
 
When I was on my cardiology preceptorship over the winter, we had a 53 year old healthy guy in clinic who had been in atrial flutter for about a week. We had plans to admit him for cardioversion and sent him up to get all of his pre-op stuff done.

While heading over with his wife, he collapses and dies from a pulmonary embolism. Literally 10 minutes after I was talking to this perfectly healthy (albeit fatigued) man, we get a page that he is dead.

Definitely humbling.
 
Livingapparatus said:
Well I am at work and was doing my own thing and about an hour ago I delivered some versed to the ICU and saw this woman in the bed. I have never seen someone in so much pain, and the fact that this med that I had in my hand could help her so much made me feel good in my own way.

Then all of a sudden she started crashing. I step out of the way and end up watching (why? im not sure). Ten minutes later shes gone. This poor woman was "fine" probably 6 hours ago and bam shes out. No family there just her. Well I am just venting a little.

I have to say I feel a bit weird. This is the first time I have seen someone go in person and man its crazy.
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First of many. It may be comforting to you to know that, if she was an ICU pt, she was probably far from "fine", and most likely, this was not unexpected.

The real hard thing is when you have to take a dead body down to the morgue. Those things are heavy as ****, and they are all floppy. Even the ones that aren't that big are tough to move around. A lot of places will have the little harness that attaches to the arm on the ceiling that will move the body over for you. Almost every department uses these except the ER, which is where I work. And I am often called upon to bring the bodies down, because I am a big guy.
 
My first night of clinical experience (ever) was in an Lv 1 Trauma center. About ten minutes after I'd arrived, there was a bunch of shouting, and a kid was wheeled past me on a stretcher covered in blood. I think he was missing a good part of the left side of his head. He'd been shot at a street corner in an apparently random act of violence (at least, that's what the news said later). About a half hour later, the family arrived, and that's when **** really hit the fan.

It gets real really fast, doesn't it?
 
I don't know if this is comforting or depressing, but when I attended multidisciplinary rounds every week in the meeting room of the ICU, you'd often hear a sudden code go off, the attending doctor leading rounds would just excuse himself and leave, another physician or resident would take over and rounds would continue as normal reviewing the patients' on the list. Nobody seemed phased by the flurry of activity literally right outside the room. I guess you get used to it after awhile.

And I agree, the peds deaths are the worse :( It pretty much breaks your heart every single time.
 
One of the first deaths I saw was an infant. I was so pissed off that I had to walk out of the ER for a few minutes to compose myself. Without going into details, this was the fault of an idiot parent who did something very stupid and irresponsible, leading to this death, and a couple other kids in the OR.
 
TexasTriathlete said:
One of the first deaths I saw was an infant. I was so pissed off that I had to walk out of the ER for a few minutes to compose myself. Without going into details, this was the fault of an idiot parent who did something very stupid and irresponsible, leading to this death, and a couple other kids in the OR.
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Now adays I wish I could take parenting out of the hands of half of the parents I see. It's simply rediculous what some of them do/don't do
 
Yeah, your first tends to shake you. The first time a patient died on me (geropsych; I was on the code team, gave her compressions for 40 minutes and bagged her for another 5 before the attending called it), I felt numb for the rest of the day. Ironically enough, I had the same feeling after the first time I restarted a patient's heart.
 
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I've never witnessed a death, but when my grandma died I was there shortly after and the paramedic asked me to help him roll her out on the gurney. That was, needless to say, awkward.
 
The first death I ever saw was a complete shock to my system. I was working in the ER at a local hospital when a 13 year old girl was wheeled in with severe chest pain - she was in the middle of a heart attack (yes, she was having a heart attack at 13) and her entire family (about 8 people) had come in with her. The girl stabilized for about an hour, and I was in the room with her, when she suddenly crashed. Once the family realized that she was gone, you could hear their screams through the entire ER before they were taken somewhere else. It was crazy and just plain haunting.
 
ejay286 said:
I've never witnessed a death, but when my grandma died I was there shortly after and the paramedic asked me to help him roll her out on the gurney. That was, needless to say, awkward.
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that was horribly inappropriate of him... I'm sorry that happened.
 
Livingapparatus said:
Well I am at work and was doing my own thing and about an hour ago I delivered some versed to the ICU and saw this woman in the bed. I have never seen someone in so much pain, and the fact that this med that I had in my hand could help her so much made me feel good in my own way.

Then all of a sudden she started crashing. I step out of the way and end up watching (why? im not sure). Ten minutes later shes gone. This poor woman was "fine" probably 6 hours ago and bam shes out. No family there just her. Well I am just venting a little.

I have to say I feel a bit weird. This is the first time I have seen someone go in person and man its crazy.
Click to expand...

My first was a middle aged female with 3 children who went into full cardiac arrest overnight. She was "found" in the morning and EMS brought her in and they attempted resuscitating but to no avail. The worst part was talking to the family. She had been sick for weeks and you could tell the husband felt guilty for not making her go to the doctor. Her mother was there blaming him as well. Not a pretty picture.

OP, it's medicine, you can't save everyone. 100% of people die at least once in their life. Sometimes it is untimely, but there you have it. At least she isn't in pain anymore.
 
Maxwell Edison said:
My first night of clinical experience (ever) was in an Lv 1 Trauma center. About ten minutes after I'd arrived, there was a bunch of shouting, and a kid was wheeled past me on a stretcher covered in blood. I think he was missing a good part of the left side of his head. He'd been shot at a street corner in an apparently random act of violence (at least, that's what the news said later). About a half hour later, the family arrived, and that's when **** really hit the fan.

It gets real really fast, doesn't it?
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yeah...it seems that 99% of the people who get shot are minding their own business on a street corner at 3AM....
 
My two encounters with patients were during undergrad... One patient came to the ER I was volunteering at because of chest pain. He looked fine, but soon after the paramedics took him into a room with his family right outside of it, he crashed and minutes later they pronounced him. That was very hard on me. I was amazed at the doctor's calmness, he just "went to talk to the family" after attempting CPR. What really felt weird was that the doctor and paramedic were talking about the doctor's new dog house during compressions...

The second patient was one that I was supposed to draw blood from when I was a phlebotomist. I walk into the room, push him a little and call his name thinking he's sleeping, and a nurse rushes in there after me saying that he is actually dead. A sign on the door/near the bed would have been nice!

While death sucks, it's a fact of life, and we have to deal with it when it comes. It doesn't make sense many times (namely with younger people), but all you can do is move on.
 
I've had a kind of slow immersion if you will. I think the first few deaths were cardiac arrests, cpr by paramedics then continued at hospital but you could just tell by history and appearance that this person wasn't going to come back.

The worst I've seen was a saddle thrombosis. 42 yo male, aao x 3, c/o sob and cp. in 30 minutes, asystole, the docs cracked the chest and massaged the heart but to no avail. The docs and residents were totally thrown because they felt powerless and humbled. Every other death I'd seen had seemed inevitable due to extensive trauma or an obvious medical condition. This time, they hadn't made the diagosis until it was far too late to save the patient.
 
My first experience was with a 15 year old boy who died. The family agreed to donate his organs, so I also observed the harvest. Afterwards, a co worker and I took the body to the morgue. It was probably my 3rd week on the job, so I learned a lot very fast! I actually kept the newspaper clipping about the kid...it was a very sad story. It was surreal at first to see a picture of him when he was alive when I had seen so much the day before. You definitely don't take so much for granted once you experience these kinds of things.
 
Depakote said:
that was horribly inappropriate of him... I'm sorry that happened.
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It actually didn't bother me as much as one would think, I guess cause I've always been one to take death pretty well. The guy was by himself and to think of it he wasn't really a paramedic since she was already dead, it was one of those services you call to pick up the dead, can't think of the name. The fact that he asked me to do it was more shocking than actually doing it. I just remember thinking that if he had asked someone much less stable he probably wouldn't have been received as cordially.
 
lazymed said:
My two encounters with patients were during undergrad... One patient came to the ER I was volunteering at because of chest pain. He looked fine, but soon after the paramedics took him into a room with his family right outside of it, he crashed and minutes later they pronounced him. That was very hard on me. I was amazed at the doctor's calmness, he just "went to talk to the family" after attempting CPR. What really felt weird was that the doctor and paramedic were talking about the doctor's new dog house during compressions...

The second patient was one that I was supposed to draw blood from when I was a phlebotomist. I walk into the room, push him a little and call his name thinking he's sleeping, and a nurse rushes in there after me saying that he is actually dead. A sign on the door/near the bed would have been nice!

While death sucks, it's a fact of life, and we have to deal with it when it comes. It doesn't make sense many times (namely with younger people), but all you can do is move on.
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The other day, up on the floor at the hospital I work at, a girl was doing her rounds taking vitals on people before a shift change. She had a lot of trouble getting them from one man, so she called another nurse in. They forgot to tell her he had died.
 
lazymed said:
... What really felt weird was that the doctor and paramedic were talking about the doctor's new dog house during compressions...
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Yeah that does make you think twice about what the effects of medicine is on a person's psyche. During my first encounter I was in the ER and in the middle of swapping nursing students and voluntters to do comporessions, the doctor would throw in a joke about getting everyone in the room a round of Epi for the road.

But that experience wasn't as bad as the 21 year old guy who slowly slipped out of consciousness while holding his parents' hand due to a bleed in his brain all the while the doctor and nurses were walking about getting the meds to put the guy under to begin emergency surgery.

I never did find out if that guy lived, but seeing his parents just made your heart sink.
 
I'd agree about the worst ones I've heard of (ones I've seen have been fairly straightforward) where the deaths was due to trauma that could have been avoided. There was a bad one under 1 yr old a few months back. The more predictable ones (I guess) were bad bicycle injury, older person heart failure and the like. Those seem easier to handle.

Seems like working in the hospital, one gets a bit jaded about people's lack of thought. (so the patient was driving without a seatbelt, rolled the vehicle, was ejected, and that's why the driver & passenger are seeing the trauma surgeon?)

It seems strange how many people are in a hospital room when someone dies. I hate it when the "family counseling room" is occupied; that's where the MD talks about what happenned.
 
yeah, bizarre experience. it was my turn to do chest compressions next, and they called it.
 
Dulcina said:
yeah, bizarre experience. it was my turn to do chest compressions next, and they called it.
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you got jipped

*EDIT*

Actually, be glad, cuz that compression is exhausting
 
Livingapparatus said:
Well I am at work and was doing my own thing and about an hour ago I delivered some versed to the ICU and saw this woman in the bed. I have never seen someone in so much pain, and the fact that this med that I had in my hand could help her so much made me feel good in my own way.

Then all of a sudden she started crashing. I step out of the way and end up watching (why? im not sure). Ten minutes later shes gone. This poor woman was "fine" probably 6 hours ago and bam shes out. No family there just her. Well I am just venting a little.

I have to say I feel a bit weird. This is the first time I have seen someone go in person and man its crazy.
Click to expand...

First time witnessing a death is quite stressful for almost everyone, but sooner or later, you will get used to it.
 
closest ive come to seeing a death was in the cath lab. A older woman was getting a temporary pacemaker put in when her o2 stats started dropping rapidly and went unconcious and every one in the lab was yelling at her trying to get her to wake up. She probably wasnt even near death but that is as close as ive seen yet.

Although there was a guy with his LAD 100% occluded and was hanging on by a thread because his RCA was backfilling into the LAD to provide flow :eek:.
 
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