I'm feeling morbid. What is the worst death you've seen? I work in a MICU, so we don't get babies or gunshots (or babies with gunshots; they do in our ER, true story.) but we see some pretty dramatic stuff. A patient dying doesn't bother me too much because most of my patients are so sick that it is a relief to send them off to the happy hunting grounds. It is the family they leave behind that holds onto me and won't let go.
We had a teenager sent to us from the hem-onc floor because he was in ARDS. He'd been sick since he was 12, and now he was really sick. He was on the oscillating ventilator all night and his sats just kept dropping; 70, 60, 50. He coded just before change of shift and when he bradied down and half the unit ran in to crack the code cart that had been sitting there all night, his mother started yelling, no no no, and it still makes me cry just to think about. I don't think anyone who was there that night was unaffected; we usually don't get kids, and it hit too close to home for most of us.
I have a lot of respect for those of you that work in peds because I could not deal with something like that more than once in a lifetime. I had one other patient when I was working on a med-surge floor, who had been using crack and ran a stopsign with her baby and her seven-year old. The baby died (we couldn't get ahold of the trauma team all day because they were working on him) and she was my patient with two chest tubes, and the pediatric surgeon came down to ask me if I thought she was stable enough to go say good bye to her baby because they were going to take him off life support. It wasn't a death that I witnessed directly, but I went home crying for three days.
Eventually she got sick enough and told. She was already in renal failure when she came in. She was crying and holding her mom and saying please, I don't want to die. She coded within 10 minutes and couldn't recover.
That is positively horrifying.
Bless that child's heart.
The sheer horror and panic of her last moments.
I swear I felt it when I read that.
And I don't think I could have gone on living had I been her mother.
Late 20's patient, lived with parents. Post op day 4 or 5, routine, non-major surgery. Got up to walk from bed to stretcher for post op test. Could barely make it to stretcher. Gasping for breath. Sats 38%. Code team called, there within 30 seconds. Worked on for over 20 minutes in the middle of the hallway. Patient's mom witness to the whole thing, could not be pulled away. Blood curteling scream when she realized patient had passed...
Horrible, horrible death for those parents. Horricifc to witness.
Hygiene Queen
2,232 Posts
That is positively horrifying.
Bless that child's heart.
The sheer horror and panic of her last moments.
I swear I felt it when I read that.
And I don't think I could have gone on living had I been her mother.