Okay, so I work part time with hospice. I like it. It's a nice break from feeling like I'm torturing souls their last days on earth up in ICU because their family of freeloaders are all living off their granddad's check....
Get a call from the hospital, one of our inpatients has died. It was expected, the poor woman was eat up with cancer, and threw a massive CVA from it. After being admitted for the CVA, family agreed to hospice. Pt has expressive aphasia....but I had her as a patient in ICU, and she recognized me when I came into the room, because she started crying and trying to talk. Did the PRN visit, adjusted a few meds, held her hand and talked to her. She kept throwing CVAs over the weekend and finally she died this morning.
I walk into the room, and I swear I wanted to go back out and choke the living daylights out of someone. Her BP had plummeted at 4am....and nobody called the family, nobody'd even called us. She's dead in the bed, and you can tell she was trying to crawl out of the bed, and her callbell was in the chair beside the bed...out of her reach. She was reaching over the rail, her eyes were still open and she was looking at the door. That woman was trying to call for help, for someone to hold her hand while she died, call her family, something, and the callbell was out of reach. She was stone cold, and rigor had set in. She'd been dead for hours.
I just closed the door, sat down by the bed and held her hand. I'd made all of our promises to her...we'd do everything we could to keep her from hurting, keep her from being scared, we'd be there when she needed us. Nothing happened on that floor last night -- no codes, nothing exciting that would explain why nobody checked on a dying hospice patient for hours -- nobody called her husband or children so they could come and be with her.
