Have you watched another person die?

[Doughbelly]

Good job, ed!

I've been fortunate that I haven't dealt with many young kids. That's the only situations that would make my ass pucker.

This is the reason I had to step away from my former job. It's the absolute worst. In the Haitian cholera outbreak, we had dozens die every day and those were just in my CTCs alone. After days and weeks, it takes a toll. When you've got patients coming to you every hour and you know that when most of the severely symptomatic U5 children aren't going to make it, and they're not going to see the next morning, you start to see pretty much every one as a lost cause and end up simply going through the motions. It's fucking brutal.

I walked away from that mission at first opportunity when the main regular project came online. I didn't even bother to pick up most of my personal gear and left most of my belongings behind.

As for TS, if you're in the profession, you'll get appropriately accustomed to what the job demands. It's when you get inappropriately accustomed to it that you need to step back to think. Before then, I wouldn't dwell on it too much.

 

[satchmo]

Was at my wife's grandfather's bedside at the moment he passed, that was pretty rough

 

[Fatt Hughes]

yes, shot a guy in reno.

 

[stoops36]

Damn on the 1st day thats rough.

I was security at a hotel before n got called to a room to wait while paramedics arrived for something. I didnt know what it was at the time.

I went up into the room to see some guy in his mid 50's laying halfway on a couch with his sobbing wife next to him. I guess the guy went into cardiac arrest and was unresponsive. I didnt know what to do so i tried feeling for a pulse but couldnt get anything. I tried to console the lady while i was there and let her know that it would be alright and said a prayer.

I remember hearing the first responders in the firetruck honking their horn and looking out the window to see them stuck at a light due to someone gridlocking and couldnt believe it. When they got there they did CPR and may have busted out the Defib (cant remember) but werent getting anything. The loaded him onto a stretcher and wheeled him away with the wife while performing CPR.

Talked to one of the responders afterward n he told me that the guy was already dead and that the rest was pretty much just a show until they could get the wife to the hospital where they would have people there who could help her deal with her loss.


I still remember seeing her come back in the main lobby later that night all alone and making eye contact with her. That was one incredibly sad and depressing moment. I wasnt shook by it really but just felt incredibly sad and bad about what i had just seen


TLDR:
- Worked at hotel
- Saw a guy in cardiac arrest with his wife crying in room
- The guy died
- Saw the wife come back to hotel alone. Incredibly sad.

 

[Chesten_Hesten]

Fuck, the ER was full of students?

 

[Bay Area]

I've never seen a man cry, till I've seen that man die

 

[Matt4786]

No, but I expect I will many times once I become a doctor. As fucked as this sounds, I'm trying to find work in the meantime that increases the probability of seeing someone die because I know I need to desensitize myself to it.

 

[jstnslby]

Was at the dope mans spot and thjs guy shot up. Bjg dude 250 plus, all the sudden his girl is slapping his pouring water on him. His lips were blue, very weak pulse if any at all. Draggdd him to a car and tpld the girl to take him to e.r. never knew what happened. But he was out cold for 15 minutes barrly bresthjng. He was cold to the touch as well. Scary shit.

 

[MC Paul Barman]

i watched my father flatline. it was surreal.

When my mom was dying they took all of the devices off.
They said that the sound of the machine slowly 'echoing' her heart beat as she died would be too much.

 

[Yuval Levy]

Yep, Israeli mandatory service. Been a medic and an field trooper.

 

[The Taxman]

can you describe what happened

Well his music hit and he did his usual descend from the ceiling thing but halfway through it looked like it just turned into a free fall. When he landed he landed on the ropes first with his torso area which then shot him back about 5 feet into the ring and he landed on his back.

He tried to get up and struggled to do about half of a sit up before he just collapsed onto his back and laid there motionless (which is probably about the time he died) about 3 or 4 people immediately ran to his side and at this moment everyone was thinking it was fake since it was scripted wrestling. It wasn't until they brought out the stretcher and more personal when it started to dawn on some people that he's actually not okay. They carried him out and just moved onto the next match like it never happened.

It wasn't until later that night when we got home that we learned he actually died right there in the ring

 

[Thanos]

Well his music hit and he did his usual descend from the ceiling thing but halfway through it looked like it just turned into a free fall. When he landed he landed on the ropes first with his torso area which then shot him back about 5 feet into the ring and he landed on his back.

He tried to get up and struggled to do about half of a sit up before he just collapsed onto his back and laid there motionless (which is probably about the time he died) about 3 or 4 people immediately ran to his side and at this moment everyone was thinking it was fake since it was scripted wrestling. It wasn't until they brought out the stretcher and more personal when it started to dawn on some people that he's actually not okay. They carried him out and just moved onto the next match like it never happened.

It wasn't until later that night when we got home that we learned he actually died right there in the ring

I read that it was a ruptured abdominal aorta

sounds about right now since he hit the ropes with his stomach

 

[The Clamburglar]

When I was a kid, I watched the brother of my friend get his head run over by a horse drawn wagon. He was jumping on and off the wagon onto an embankment and slipped and fell backwards in between the wagon and the side of the bank. Both of his brothers and myself, as well as about 15-20 other kids were there. He lived for about 1 minute with the top of his head crushed while yelling for his mom. It was very sad and traumatic for the people in my town. The poor old guy that was driving the wagon, and had done this annual wagon ride for 40+ years sold his horses and burned the wagon and went into a deep depression, he blamed himself, eventhough none of the fault was his. It was just a rambunctious kid that couldn't sit still. He went from the strongest 75 year old you'd ever seen to a withered up old man in like 3 months, and died about a year later. It haunted him.

 

[hoonosewot88]

Seeing a death on your first day in A+E is pretty damn unlucky. I didn't see my first until my second year in hospital as a med student. Was on call on a night and an old fella arrested on the the ward we were on, me and the junior doc i was with were first medics on the scene.

Managed to keep my head enough to help assess him and start compressions whilst the junior dealt with the airway, but i was so amped up i forgot to keep count, probably ended up doing 40 compressions instead of 30 before the junior reminded me he needed to get some air in.

I have never been as relieved to see anyone as i was to see the registrar arrive a minute later. She totally took control and calmed everything incredibly with her presence.

The guy died in the end obviously, and i was kind of surprised how little it did rattle me. I've seen dead people before and this guy was due to go really so i wasn't particularly upset about it. Though the feeling of his ribs cracking under my hands whilst i was doing compressions sat in my mind for a good while afterwards.

 

[Zer]

Only on the internet

What always sticks with me is whenever a person becomes seemingly numb to whatever's happening to them. Like I watched some video from Syria or some shit with a dude getting stabbed to death over several minutes and after a while, this guy's obviously still alive and moving but not in response to the stabbings, he's just groggy about the whole thing.

I suppose at that point they're essentially braindead, but the possibility that they're conscious, just resigned to death and in a completely different place mentally is frightening. And the thought of where they'd be if they did survive and physically recover is frightening too

 

[The Clamburglar]

When i was 14 i watched my dad die of pancreatic cancer. Went from 210 to 140 in two months. He told me that what was worse than even the pain and fear, was the expressions on the faces of his friends when they went to visit him, seeing how shocked they were at the decrepitude of a man who used to be strong and vital. At the very end he was so fucked up on morphine that he didn't even recognize me or my mom before he moved on.

Since then I've always tried to eat life with a big spoon. And not bitch so much when it doesn't taste like ice cream.

That is brutal dude. I'm sorry to hear that.

I lost an aunt, who was like a mother to me, to cancer. First she had both of her breasts removed due to breast cancer, got lung cancer, and then battled brain cancer. She had been fighting various forms of cancer for 28 years, more than my entire life to that point, before it finally took her. The last time that I saw her in the hospital she was hallucinating and thought I was still 8 years old and asked me if I wanted to go play in the paddle boat (she had a massive pond on her property). I was 24 years old. When I left the hospital she said "You be a good boy and I'll see you this weekend." I knew there wouldn't be another weekend. She died later that night. I was a pallbearer at her funeral and even though she was only about 75 lbs. when she died, that casket was the heaviest thing I have ever lifted.

 

[hoonosewot88]

I feel like it will get easier but I feel like the train of thought of just accepting the inevitable (death) is diametrically opposed to a doctors values outlined in the Hippocratic Oath.

I guess it was harder because the team leader just called it and essentially said it was pointless because her life was not one worth living because she was unable to live comfortably without a person to care for her. She had no DNAR and no immediate family that could be contacted...so the decision was up to the doctors.

To be fair, that decision was always going to be up to the doctors in the end anyway. Stopping resuscitation is a medical decision made in the best interests of the patient, as contradictory as that sounds. It's not the families choice, and putting it on them wouldn't be fair a lot of the time anyway. Though obviously it's good practice to talk with them about it when necessary.

 

[shunyata]

Today was my 1st day in the ER as a student doctor. It's my first year in the actual hospital and I have been just learning the ins and outs of taking a patient history, physical examination and applying the knowledge I learned.

Today I was just expecting orientation and a tour around the ER then I thought the attending would let us out early. Instead, my colleagues and I were thrown right into the action. My first task was to take an H&P (history and physical) of a patient but she refused to talk to a student doctor so after a few minutes of standing around, the attending got a call over the loudspeaker to the Resus unit. He told me to follow him there to see the patient.

For those who do not know what the Resus unit is, it is the part of the ER that is reserved for those who are in the most critical conditions. Upon entering the small room enclosed only by curtains on each side, I see one nurse and another more junior doctor trying to stabilize the patient and get an ABG. Within the first few minutes, the attending receives the ECG and asks me to tell him what I see. The patient has a heart rate of 128 and AF with right axial deviation. He tells me he is going to give the patient Furosemide to decrease the pre-load on the heart and he then talks through medical management of patients with atrial fibrillation. As he prepares to put an IV cannula in, the patient turns cold and becomes unresponsive. The next step was to get a BiPAP machine to hyperinflate the lungs to squeeze the heart to possibly try to increase contractility (Starling mechanism). The BiPAP machine gets wheeled in and as the nurse and doctors are trying to put the mask on, the patient turns white. The two doctors start CPR and yell at me to time 2 min intervals where they re-assess vital signs. I'm completely frozen at this point and don't really know what to do, so I just stand there. 3 more nurses and 3 more doctors come in to try to resuscitate this patient but after about 5 rounds of CPR, the team leader calls it and records the time of death.

After everyone disperses, the attending comes up to me and asks me if I'm alright. I say, "yeah." and I continue to help with rounds for the next 3 hours. I was fine until a few hours ago when I started thinking about what happened so I drank a glass of wine, almost threw up, and now my left hand is shaking.

TLDR: I saw a patient die on my first day in the ER.

Have you ever seen a person die? How did you feel?

For those who have seen a person die, how did you deal with it?

Look on the bright side, you haven't killed anyone yet!

In the end it's not the dying that will haunt you. It's the iatrogenic complications that lead to death (like that 82 year old who gets a colonostomy from a resident, gets their bowel perforated and no one notices, comes back to the ER with a fever, treated for sepsis with IV antibiotics which damage the kidneys, boom kidney failure....... circling the drain), and the patients who should have been allowed to die weeks ago but the family still demands a full code. Those two scenarios are hard to forget. In the first, you know you or your coworker directly contributed to the patient's death. In the second, you know you are abusing an elder who has no chance of recovering simply because their family members can't grasp the concept of mortality but you can't tell the full truth of the situation because telling people the truth adversely affects those patient satisfaction surveys that the hospital administration thinks are the most important things on the planet.

Actually those are more ICU problems. Just try not to kill anyone in the ER. Leave that to the surgical residents.

 

[IIIIIIII]

i work in a hospital, and i unfortunately see too much of this. i work in i.t., so while i have nothing to do with the work that is being done, i have to be in the area to work on the computers there.

the worst times it seems to me, is when the patient is dying like the threadstarter's story, and when the doctors tell the family the bad news. the latter is probably the worst. some of the screams and sobs are just horrible. it really puts everything else in your life into perspective.

 

[shunyata]

I feel like it will get easier but I feel like the train of thought of just accepting the inevitable (death) is diametrically opposed to a doctors values outlined in the Hippocratic Oath.

I guess it was harder because the team leader just called it and essentially said it was pointless because her life was not one worth living because she was unable to live comfortably without a person to care for her. She had no DNAR and no immediate family that could be contacted...so the decision was up to the doctors.

It's actually the opposite.

It is following the oath to the letter.

First, do no harm.

If you can't do any good at all, why drag out the suffering? That would be doing harm.

If your patient has three organ systems that have failed, a fourth one going down fast, is maxed on pressors yet barely has a pulse, and they haven't been conscious in weeks, what is there that you can possibly help with?

Remember, first do no harm.


It is natural for elders to die. If this is any way preventable, we take all rational actions to keep them alive. But beyond a certain point everyone in the unit knows they won't recover, won't improve, and ultimately it becomes family endorsed elder abuse.




Mental health protip: avoid pediatric oncology as a specialty.