“Knock, knock …”
Family members are always asking, understandably, how long a dying loved one has, and we all give some variant of “It’s hard to say…” The disease process is usually easy enough to predict that it has made fools of all of us at one time or another. And there are physicians who as residents have rounded on dead patients, and there are those who won’t admit that they have.
Death exists to embarrass us.
Oh yeah, and nurses make the WORST patients. They know enough to often act like know-it-alls when it’s them, and I take a back seat to no one in my love and respect for, and reliance on nurses. But they are terrible patients.
“Doctors declared retired nurse Bella Montoya dead following a possible stroke and cardiopulmonary arrest. She did not respond to resuscitation efforts, Ecuador’s health ministry said.” The family had a wake at home, and of course the pain-in-the-ass deceased “woke up five hours into her remembrance service and started knocking inside her coffin.” Sh was taken back to the hospital ICU, where she died a week later. Probably just to spite the doctors one more time.
Apparently, this happened earlier this year in Iowa to a 66-year-old advanced Alzheimer’s patient. She was bagged and zipped at the nursing home…and then EMS was called to the funeral home because she started breathing again. Of course, it’s Iowa, so death, dementia, and catatonic boredom must all have been in the differential. They probably get a lot of that.
In 2020, Detroit paramedics worked a code on a 20-year-old for a half hour, then got the ER doc’s permission to call it. And then over an hour later, when they prepared to start embalming … opened her eyes. Sadly, she died two months late of the anoxic damage she had suffered. I sincerely believe the EMS crew and ER doc feel terrible about this, and I’m equally certain the family’s malpractice attorney is delighted.
For the laypersons who wonder how these cases could have ever happened, all I can tell you is that death is death, and we have all seen enough of it to know it – except when one of these bizarre variations bites us on the ass. As an intern, I told a large family all gathered in one waiting room that their loved one had died. And then when the nurse ran in to whisper in my ear, I learned that a morbidly obese patient pumped full of buckets of epinephrine, and pronounced legitimately dead, may in fact develop a spontaneous pulse … and then the family is uncertain, then pissed…and then when the pulse is lost again, finally, inevitably, the family is REALLY pissed. So I feel for the docs in these situations, and I’m happy as hell it wasn’t me.
Never happened to me but did happen to EMS in the town where I first practiced. It was a death at home, the coroner had come, and they were on their way to the funeral home. The driver guy thought the rider guy was just messing with him. Scared them both out of a year’s growth.
Never had this happen to me in over 30 years. Guess I was a lucky doc. When they were dead, they were dead. I can see where others had a different unfortunate experience. That’s life! Or death depending one’s point of view.
I actually had this happen to me years ago. I was called to the floor to declare a patient who had died. I examined him thoroughly, or so I thought. On auscultation, I could not detect a heartbeat and there was no palpable pulse. No chest rise or detectable respiration (I didn’t have a mirror on me, which was the standard of care for detecting respiration at the time 😉). His eyes were even fixed/dilated. I declared him dead, wrote the note and returned to the ED. Shortly thereafter, I was called to the floor to declare him alive! Whoops! It’s been a long time since then, so I can’t recall how I charted his recovery. I’d love to read it now!