My patient came in with a devastating injury and he has a very poor prognosis. The trauma docs I work with made this prognosis very clear to his family, and all of them seem to grasp the situation well except for his wife. After the trauma attending spoke with the family, he brought the wife and her friend back. He and I were at the bedside trying our hardest to be supportive, but we grew more and more uncomfortable watching the wife with the patient. While this was going on, her friend was looking at ME with this mortified expression on her face.
While acting pretty histrionically, she began kissing his hands, then she kissed his face and neck repeatedly. Then a couple minutes later, she pulled the blanket off of him and unsnapped his gown and started stroking and kissing his bare chest. The doc kept looking at me with this "What the heck do we do?" look on his face, and I'm sure I was giving him the same expression. At first, I thought that if she wasn't really doing any harm to him, then she should be able to do what she needs to do to help her grieve, because her husband will most certainly die from this. Then a couple minutes later, I thought that how she was exposing his chest and touching him like that in front of her friend wasn't giving him much dignity (the trauma surgeon and I were talking after and we both thought that a lot of what we saw bordered on sexual...bleuughh), so I decided enough was enough. Before I got my courage to say something about her behavior, I had to leave the room to take a phone call. Then the doc left the room to return a page. When I came back, she was basically straddling him in the bed. I said, "I need to collect labs. Do you want to go get coffee downstairs while I get them?" They left, but came back a couple hours later. I made it clear that she can't expose him (he had a low temp, so I put on a Bair Hugger) and that touching him so much interferred with the EKG. She didn't really listen to me and I returned to the room to find her laying next to him in the bed with her legs draped over his, stroking his chest. I told her she couldn't be in the bed with him and she got out, reluctantly, but as soon as I left and then came back, she crawled back in the bed with him. I needed to retape his ET tube with RT, so I asked her to leave again. I ended up putting the bed high in the air and put all the bed rails up so she couldn't climb up into the bed when she returned. She never did return to the room by the time my shift was over, but I reported all this to the on-coming nurse, who's a very seasoned nurse and she was a little shocked by what I told her I witnessed.
Part of feels like I'm being way too judgemental about this, but I've been a nurse for almost 8 years and have dealt with a lot of end of life cases, and this was by far the most bizarre reaction I've ever seen. Would you agree that this reaction is pretty off the wall, or do you think I'm being a bit too prudish? Do any of YOU have a comparable story (or more odd story) to share?
