We had a few where we went to pronounce someone dead but they were alive. One lady woke up and wanted a banana. The kitchen was closed but the nurse found someone who had one in her lunch bag. Because if someone returns from the dead asking for fruit, you find it.
My grandmother was declared dead in the hospital, and the funeral home was called. They went in to collect the body and came right back out. Told the nurse "we don't take 'em if they're still breathing." Much confusion but grandmother lived another week after being declared dead.
we had a patient pronounced (they were on hospice) only to spontaneously resuscitate five minutes later. fifteen minutes later, they passed again. permanently this time thanks for the 5k likes!!
We had a patient pass after a code. Post mortem care was done (cleaning the patient before the funeral home picks them up). All discharge paperwork done and ready for the funeral home. Everything. Only for one of the techs to have a weird gut instinct, and put new telemetry electrodes on her, to find a perfectly fine heart. This was two years ago, that patient was recently admitted again and safely discharged alive. That was a wild phone call to admissions after the code, meanwhile the doctor who was still at the nurses desk checking on his other patients was fully dumbfounded
This is why we didn’t have a DNR for my mother-in-law when she was at a nursing facility. Having been EMTs, working with emergency services, we didn’t have much confidence in facilities medical staff being able to determine death so preferred they have to transport to the hospital where a trauma team would decide.
The one time I was performing a death exam, and I felt a pulse. I asked my registrar to come and confirm and she couldn’t feel one. Turns out I was palpating the carotids so hard that I was feeling my own pulse 😂
Nah, you can feel your pulse with other thumbs as well. My pulse is very distinct. I was used as a reference during my studies. Also I never drank water, so my blood was black. And there was this show, the 100, so that was funny 🤣.
@@NopeNope-gnos well no. Defining death is difficult as it to most people would be an assumption that your mind has ceased. however with your definition, someone that has "died" could theoretically be brought back to life if their brain isn't damaged. or what about people that are brain dead and we use machines to force their lungs and heart to keep going? Are they dead? Their body is still alive, tissues are replicating and functioning normally. Death is hard to define, because a mind can die and the body it inhabits can still be very much alive, and just because a mind is dead, doesn't mean it can't come back.
@@rainbowskin3379 death does not mean resuscitation is impossible friend, I just shared the most commonly agreed upon definition that we're taught in school.
@@NopeNope-gnos my point is that the medical definition of death is in direct conflict with the layman definition, and that trying to define death will always leave issues.
Yeah, in the 60's they held a summit to nail down a definition and it took 3 days to get a consensus. It's very specific yet also loosely worded. So there's a lot of room to play. That's why we have the terms "brain dead" and "clinically dead" as well, because there are multiple definitions.
Hospice nurse here. We pronounced a pt in a nursing facility. 15 minutes later her husband arrived. He had dementia so we knew he didnt understand what we were telling him. He walked over to the bed and picked up a cup of OJ and proceeded to pour it down her throat. He had a history of being combative and got very agitated when we tried to stop him. Pt started choking!!! 15 minutes AFTER no pulse, no respiration, no BP and fixed and dilated pupils!!! She died like 2 minutes later. I will never forget that one!!!
Dementia is hard to grasp but I've seen muscle memory make a dementia sufferer do stuff even though they don't remember why they do it. Sometimes, it sparks a faint partial explanation as to why they do what it is, but most of the time its unknown why but just a compulsion. That man might have had the muscle memory of giving her something to drink when she looked a certain way. If he used to take care of her it might just have been a compulsion in that moment that he couldn't resist. Dementia also makes sufferers combative and changes their ability to reason so I can understand he might have been an issue to wrangle in on past occasions.
Years ago we had a government undertaker "Jack" bring in a deceased motorbike rider. "Jack", who was very well known and had done the job for ages, told the young reg that he didn't need to come out to check. The reg got his stethoscope and torch and demanded to check. Jack unzipped the bag and the reg stepped back shocked. The reg asked "Where's the head ?" Jack simply replied,"down near his feet."
Aw, he was trying to spare the reg some trauma. My grandma worked in the ER and said the motorcycle accident victims came in in pieces. She wouldn't let her kids ride them.
As an American who has spent too much time in my youth around rednecks, I was very concerned abt what that reg was gonna light with their torch... as an enjoyer of British entertainment, I realized a second later the light in question was not in fact fire-based.😅😂
A death exam doesnt sound silly after you hear the stories about the people who were thought to be dead that actually weren't, only to wake up in the morgue or their grave
During the one of the major flu epidemics, my great grandfather was pronounced dead and taken to the morgue. They were so overrun that it took like two days to get to him and when they did, he was still breathing. The theory is that the fever cooked him pretty bad and somehow putting him on ice saved him by letting his body recover at the last minute. He was absolutely batshit crazy and it was worse after that, but lived almost until I was born like 50 years later? I still have the newspaper articles locally ran about it and I think my grandmother still has the other paperwork. I really need to make digital copies!
@@mialemon6186 damn, that's nuts, no pun intended. I wonder if that's what happened to some of the others that had been pronounced dead only to revive or wake up later on in the morgue and such! Thanks for sharing that!
During the late 1800's epidemic they tied a string around the wrist in the grave, and the other end was tied to a bell hanging above the grave. Hoping that if they were still alive they'd start flailing around and ring the bell. Somebody stayed by the grave for a couple days after death. That's where the term “Dead Ringer” came from. Weird facts I know. But your comment about even coming awake in the grave reminded me of this. Take care, stay safe, have a nice day. 👵☮️🖖
We had a patient with no bp, no pulse and she was chatting to us to stop fussing about her. She passed away shortly after but still the weirdest moment of all of our careers so far. We spent hours trying to get a pulse and bp but just couldn’t…
My dad had a creepier story. The death exam had already taken place and he was the student assigned to take the body to the morgue. He went into the room, a flash of lightening hit and he saw the guy sit straight up and say something about getting his dinner. My dad immediately paged the nurse who was understandably annoyed saying she didn't have time for pranks. He said her in here NOW! She came in to an alive person. She called the Dr. who called the death and he was just like the nurse at first, until she screamed at him and was flipping out. The doctor got up there and was absolutely stunned. All 3 of them were so confused. A few minutes after confirming the guy was actually alive again, the patient said, "I don't feel so good." Then he died. They left him in the room on a monitor overnight. So freaky!!!
I died in my own home in the bathroom my uncle was the one who had to see for how long I was dead I was ice cold I was dead dead but I came back to life, yeah I dead on the toilet when I was 18.5y now I'm 24.5y I also died of feb14 around 4am it was around 10-11 when i was found I just kept dieing and coming back to life. I had a heart attack i was also very sick at the time only get up to pee
I used to be a lab technician at the hospital. I had a patient that I had had for about two weeks she was very elderly and we checked labs on her several times a day. She was heavily medicated and typically didn’t even move when I stuck her. One morning I went in to pull her labs and as soon as I touched her I knew.. she was cold to the touch and already in full rigor, it was a huge mess because apparently no one had noticed this sweet old lady had passed throughout the entire previous shift.
When I was a hospice nurse there was one patient I pronounced dead like 3 times...absent apical pulse for a full minute and other signs present. Each time it happened weeks apart... He must've had unfinished business. But he finally peacefully passed.
We once had a guy come to ER for CP and he coded and was pronounced dead. They left the life pack on him and he got rosc which they noticed when they brought in the body bag like 20 mins later. They immediately tube him and send him to my unit where he proceeded to do things like beat the crap out of all of us when he was extubated, get re intubated and extubated three separate times, eventually walk out of the hospital, refuse to follow his docs advice and then finally he passed away months later from the same issues he had before. I could not believe he literally came back to life though. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen that. Usually dead means dead 😅
In older times, it happened so often that graves were equipped with bells to ring if they were buried alive. We stopped doing that because we got better at identifying the dead but tbh I wish we still did. It was a safety measure, why not?
@nequastar1826 your point? Imagine your mom is dead in a hospital bed and they harvest her eyes for donation thinking it was a different person and they say "oh well, they're both dead" and now you get to have a closed casket bc mama get mutilated? 😂 Such little understanding of why medical practice and law are so intertwined, even a show like greys could teach you something😂
@RiceBalls888 Did you not read the other comment? In normal circumstances dead people don't usually need to be identified multiple times, but it is standard for donors
In my very 1st code, the guy was found on the floor, so the code was run where he layed. The code team worked on the guy for a half hr., but couldn't get a heart rhythm, so they called the code and pronounced him. After the code team left, the nurses were rolling the guy onto a sheet, to get him up onto a gurney, when suddenly, a nurse noted he had a bounding carotid pulse... I ran down the hallway to call the code team to come back. They worked on him for a while, and then transferred him to ICU. In the hospital, I was told to NEVER turn a dying patient, close to the end of my shift, as turning them can cause fluid shifts, and the patient will often pass away. In this case, turning the patient actually HELPED the patient.😮
@@anniep6248 a lot of my patients have been very sick and that's why they needed their heart looked at. On a ventilator, or worse. they often called me when they were trying to figure out if the cpr was working. When they were still doing cpr I tried to get what I could in that position due to timing, but sometimes they would turn them if necessary. It's quite difficult to see the heart with a patient flat. They would often decide if they should continue cpr based on my images. Pretty intense
We had a “ghost” that would walk out of the morgue and open the creepy basement elevators. Believe or don’t believe, there were some creeped out people who claimed someone walked on an elevator from the morgue door, got in the elevator, doors close, they immediately pressed the up button and the same elevator doors immediately opened with no one inside.
I believe it. But I've seen a ghost, with someone who was also seeing it. Shit gets pretty real when you're both standing w your jaw on the floor. You know who DIDN'T believe it? The person who had the ghost standing next to them, like "attending" them. Hey girl thats your ma. She said she was a Christian so couldn't believe. I said, whatever it's not up for debate. It happened. We saw. Your ghost. Your person. Had to be her mom. I was like so you believe in the biggest ghost of all, the holy ghost, but your dead mom is somehow too far out? And really with the way u live you'd better hope gods not real cause you are not part of the 144,000 babe. Not joking.
My sister and I took turns sleeping on a sofa at the end of a hospital hall across from a set of elevators after our Mom was admitted for an accidental fall. All during the night those elevators opened and closed with no one in them. Gave a bizarre feeling to the whole experience, not to mention little sleep.
Ooh we had a haunted ward in our hospital. Something about a patient who died during child birth. Or her baby died. Either way, she cursed the doctors/nurses and you could hear her wails. Now the ward is boarded up and doesn't exist but I swear one day my friends and I walked past, we could hear a strange rumbling sound. It was broad daylight. And then we ran. Pretty creepy.
@@user-Danswife yepp. There's two theories : a. She died while giving birth and you can stil hear her screams. Or b. Her baby died during childbirth and she cursed the staff.
A friend of mine was in the hospital and in the hallway on his bed. He likes to sleep with his covers over his head. Anyway he was wheeled down to a room in the basement. He was there a long time. When a nurse came in he said. I am cold my I have another blanket? The nurse screamed as that was where they put people that passed away 😅
That sounds more like agonal breathing. It's not actually effective breathing, but lots of people mistake it for that. That is why a death confirmation is needed. Remember that hundreds of years ago, many people were buried alive due to an insufficient consensus on what made a person dead.
@@auntlynnieYes! It's not a sign of pain or distress (despite the name), it's a totally natural part of passing away. Agonal breathing is just a body reflex that occurs as the body is shutting down the rest of the way. Your dad wasn't in any pain or fear from it. It's just upsetting for us living folks to have to watch because it looks very upsetting and is often confusing (as it was in your case). I hope you and your family take care.
I worked in dialysis and I hated when a patient was a DNR. We legally cannot perform any live saving treatment and have nothing to ease any pain they may be in. We grab the curtains and shun them from the rest of the room but everyone can still hear them dying 😅 I quit that job because I couldn’t handle it emotionally but I love old people and love caring for them
@@m0ther0ne pain relief usually includes removing the cause as in water for dehydrated etc. Dying for starving etc is not a painless way to go the headache is the worst kind!
@@Helena-ox7cr in UK DNR means do not resuscitate. Ie if they have a heart attack we no not give CPR. It doesn’t mean we let them die in pain, what you describe is torture.
They needed to do death exams because back in the day that used to bury people alive. I heard a story was about some girl, who went into anaphylactic shock and woke up in her coffin at the funeral after they buried her, and then by the time they dug down to open the coffin she had died of a heart attack or some thing. Back in the day they used to put bells down to the coffin in case the person was still alive Then they could ring it and be saved potentially… saved by the Bell
The creepiest thing I've seen is terminal dementia. The first time I saw a patient with that condition, he was just sitting in his chair, eyes open, staring in the void, completely unresponsive, with his mouth slightly ajar with a string of saliva dripping down. It was as if his soul was taken by a dementor....
Horrifying. I would only wish that on the worst of us. No doubt it is no punishment at all, though. I hope it’s more peaceful than it looks, at least. 🥺
My uncle was declared dead and still woke up when they were taing him to the morgue. He spent 5yrs after that trying to prove he wasnt dead because the death certificate already went through the court systems. Alot of people thought he was a scam artist, but no, hes just your friendly neighborhood zombie. Minus the intense urge to eat people..
I had a friend who was in first year nursing school. They were doing practical in a nursing home. One of her classmates did a full set of vitals on a patient and it wasn't adding up. Patient was dead and cold and she somehow didn't notice. That student failed.
@@kathyroux7386 IIRC from my friend telling me the story, she spent 15 minutes trying to get a BP off a cold corpse before asking her preceptor for help.
Just had my first patient expiration as I'm doing my nursing clinical.. as we were bagging her, even after the death exam, we had to stop a few times just to make sure because a RN thought she saw spontaneous breathing.. there are horror stories of people ending up at the morgue even after a death exam.
There are also instances of cataplexy or diabetic comas where people have appeared dead, been put in a drawer or had their autopsy started when someone had the horrific realization that the patient was bleeding. You don't really bleed once you're dead because your heart is no longer pumping. I've heard, "You're not dead until you're cold and dead," but that's usually about using lifesaving measures and when to stop, but it can also serve as a reminder that a weak pulse or respiration can exist in a warm body because the person is still alive but it's just hard to detect.
I enjoy your videos, but do want to clarify one point you simplified in this one: Patients are not placed on hospice care solely "based on their age or the severity of health conditions". A patient must express a wish to be on comfort care or have a Do Not Resuscitate code status (or in the case of a patient who cannot express their own wishes, the patients health care proxy will be called upon). The patient (or their proxy) may take age or health status into consideration when making these decisions, but they don't have to. There are many patients of advanced age with severe health conditions getting heroic levels of care in any given ICU.
My uncle "passed away" in the ER from--heart attack. They cleaned him up and the family went in and said good-bye. They took him to the morgue and placed him in the refrigerated drawer. When they pulled him out about an hour later he sat up! Lived another decade!
My Dad's patient asked him to close the blinds in this room Because the kids outside his window were bothering him. The man was on the second story there were no kids.
@@faizanalvi3932 or hypersensitive hearing. I can hear all the people in my building and what people outside are talking about (I live on the 4th floor). So it can also be the case... I'd be more worried if there was no possible chance of children being in the area
That just sounds like some gold ol brainrot, usually has some obvious accompanying signs such as hallucinations like you mentioned, often forgetfulness, but 100% someone has brainrot they're republican so that's by far the easiest way to tell.
I was in the hospital when a patient with a DNR in the next room died. They just closed the blinds on the windows, let the family do some crying, closed all the other room doors, and wheeled the covered patient away. After cleaning a new patient was wheeled in a short time later. I asked the nurse "Did that lady die?" and she said yes but they weren't supposed to talk about it.
@@Dawnbandit1the commenter never once clarified what they were doing at the hospital. If the nurse didn't wanna talk to them about it odds are nothing to do with that patient
Despite being on hospice care, wasn't the patient in 424 hooked up to a heart monitor that would trigger an alarm at the nurse's station if their heart stopped beating?
Also depends on the hospital and the unit. I know he responded back about how hospice generally doesn't have them which is probably the most likely answer. But as I have been admitted 4 time within the last year, certain units don't have them either. Med Surg didn't have me connected, instead one of the CNA's would do my vitals during meals, and various times when I've been in the ER, even in the times I've been admitted, I haven't always been hooked up to those monitors. In the ER they tend to triage the patients, leaving the monitors for the patients who need them the most. Once I was stabilized enough to not need them, I was taken off of them and became a "hallway patient" whether they were waiting for me to be admitted or getting me the last of treatment/exam/results while getting me discharged.
Here's one for you .I use to work for a funeral home as a sales rep selling funeral policys, my office was at a mortuary, one morning I came in and the office was in a laughing mood and joking about what happened early that morning, one of our drivers was called out to collect a deceased at a nearby home , got there about 20 minutes after the paramedics declared the patient dead , cool beans load him up and and leave immediately as the m as it was not a far drive but the driver wanted to get the patient to the freezer. Half way back wile blaring music he feels a tap on his shoulder and hears , Hy can I have a smoke ... Driver jumped out of a moving car while screaming so hard he lost his voice and was on sick leave for about 3 days , was apparently a really unexpected family reunion, this happened 6 years ago , dude still lives and a happy horror story
My military criminal investigator Dad had to confirm that helicopter crashes on base during training on were not murders nor suicides. One would think it's obvious, but it has to be checked out.
I once escorted a funeral director to the room of a patient who had died that night. The patient’s roommate sometimes slept with the blanket pulled up over her head. I left the funeral director at the doorway because I had to answer a phone call, and when I came back, he was getting ready to move the very much alive but blanket over her head sleeping roommate onto his stretcher. I said, “No, no, not her, it’s the other one!!” He was so embarrassed at first, but we had a good laugh afterwards.
My Papaw (1stSgt&Combat medic in the 1st infantry Division) Told me about dead man walking syndrome as he called it... Could be PTSD Hallucinations... But he told me about a fellow who was electriuted and became crispy, but his body lived long enough for him to report his own death, then Fell down... A second one was the dude talked to him until the topic about his car came up, despite that his inside were mush... Like no way he should've been able to talk... Much less anything else... Again, could be PTSD Hallucinations or other Mental problems...
This happened to some of the people who were in the blast radius of the atom bombs in Japan. They were completely burnt like a husk, but the barely functional muscles inside was still able to let them keep walking for a surprising distance until they fell down. I think when you sustain injuries that horrible, we can hope at least that they don't feel pain and therefore don't really understand what's happening. A small comfort.
The body is a resilient machine and life functions tend to taper off rather than instantly shut down. If someone loses their heart they'll be alive for a minute or two at least, and even fatal doses of neutron radiation don't kill immediately despite irreparable damage to every cell. It's quite possible for adrenaline to keep people moving until they physically can't anymore.
there are stories of people acting fairly normal despite catastrophic injuries, like that older lady on 9/11 who got bisected (iirc). I've heard something about how people can suddenly function better right before they die because their body is no longer wasting energy trying to keep itself alive.
I wouldn't say that's a creepy story, more just a sad coincidence. Considering they would've been in a hospice wing, it's not unlikely to see two deaths.
Essentially one patient (425) was on hospice, aka they're in the hospital for comfort with their death known and expected. 424 was there in an attempt to keep them alive. The nurse was sent to do a death check on the hospice patient, got the wrong room, and confirmed the unexpected death of the patient they were trying to keep alive
Mine was when we had a patient pass, a new hire was with me preparing the body to go to the morgue. As she was tying hhis toe-tag on, he let the rest of the air from his lungs. The same time, the screamer in the room next door let out the loudest grunt ever and she screamed just as loud! Her face was started to flush and beads of perspiration were building on her forehead. I didnt let her back in the room until he was zipped up and ready to go downstairs. She put in a request to transfer to a different unit. Med oncology wasn't her thing lol!
I was a patient in the hospital when a cna came in to talk to the nurse about bathing a dead covid patient and the nurse said remember to close the eyes.
My mom’s nursing home didn’t do this and my sister and I were furious. They nothing to prepare her. Her mouth was open and arm hanging off the bed. It was traumatizing. Thankfully we went to see her before we brought my dad from his room. We he passed away 10 months later, the nurse that called me to inform me took such care in preparing him for us. She was a rare gem in that horrid place.
Old x-ray tech. Predawn med center portables had more of a wildcard factor back in the day finding folks in various states. Arriving to find a patient passed since the order was put in and being waived off still not a rarity. A morbid ‘pro-tip’ I give students is carrying a locked door bypass key so one can investigate a no response before calling for help.
This happens often. Decades ago, I was allowed to follow my brother on his hospital rounds. He noticed a patient in the bed next to his patient, whose eyes were wide open, common in death until someone closes them. He called in the nurse and told her "this patient is deceased," and we left.
I can see that happening. More than once the a.m. nurses come on shift to find their newly assigned patient dead and when you check tbe night nurses' notes every few hours there's a note that says "sleeping confortably" 😴 😢
In WI only an MD, Coroner or Hospice RN can pronounce. A facility RN can note the passing (absence of spontaneous respirations and undetected pulse), but needs to notify the MD for TOD. Hospice RN confirms death by listening to heart and respiratory sounds for 2 minutes. If none heard, TOD is noted. Usually when the Hospice RN has arrived the deceased appear quite dead, color is grey, skin cool to touch and body becoming rigid. No mistaking this for still being alive. Death is not an emergency.
I don't know why a death exam would sound silly because I think I would want to make sure someone was dead before they went to the morgue. 😂 But I did work for West Virginia University surgery and Trauma Services/ Residency program, so I understand.
When my son was on hospice and he passed, his heart kept restrting all on its own. It took 2 hours for it to finally stop. His nurses told me this happens in the hospital a lot, but she's never seen this happen outside of a hospital setting and it has never lasted so long.
Dude! My wife's coworker comes up into a room in emerge and finds a fellow who had passed away. She leaves to call for a doc, and when she comes back he was sitting up in bed and says "I've had the weirdest dream" She rushes out of the room for help but when she came back he was dead again. For those wondering. It was a new hospital and while the phone systems were in their fixed locations outside of the rooms, they were not connected. There was a series of these sorts of fuck ups through the hospital, and getting anything done, even if important, is a painfully slow process
My mom has a great one of these! She was a young nurse working in a children’s hospital. It was the small hours of Halloween night (I guess it was technically the day after Halloween but I digress,) and she was on the Night Shift. She had been given the job of changing a bag of blood for a kid who had recently had an operation. As she was hooking it up, the bag tore and began to stream down her arm. Slightly panicked because she was now covered in blood and knew she was in trouble for wasting a bag, she looked up to see the clock ominously turning counter clockwise in the corner of the dark room. She quickly cleaned up and replaced the blood, but needless to say, she was pretty spooked! Oh and if you were wondering, it was daylight savings.
We had a problem of not having a doctor on duty. We started CPR and once you start you can't stop until someone declares the patient or you are too exhausted to continue. Our team is big enough to keep rotating people. An ambulance wasn't available and the weather grounded helicopters. We did cpr for over two hours before the weather lifted enough for the helicopter. The flight nurse called him and we could stop.
@@djsaidez271 Sure was. I am a ski patroller and while we have deaths it is not frequent. We had two that week. One guy went off a jump and landed on his chest tearing his aorta (the guy we did cpr on) and the other guy fell on a run and hit his head while not wearing a helmet. He was alive when he left on the helicopter, but died later. It was hard on everone.
When I worked in a care home on nights if a patient died we would call the funeral home to come collect the body, after the doctor had been and lock the body in the bedroom until it could be moved to stop wandering patients going in. One night this happened we were waiting for the funeral home people, and the lights in the locked room kept randomly switching themselves on (there was a small glass window above the door, so you could see the light come on even though it was locked) and at one point the sensor alarm went off. Super weird. Super freaky the door was locked the whole time with only me having the key.
I think there's an episode of the Twilight Zone (or a similar old B&W show) where a guy is alive but everyone thinks he's dead and you hear his thoughts through the entire show (he's entirely paralyzed from a car crash but can somehow still breathe.) They finally see him shed a tear and realize he's still alive right before they were about to start embalming him. 😬
Holy crap I didn't know this was a thing! Also this is exactly what I needed for a story. Long story short, woman who can see ghosts/spirits finds a position for ghost administration aka dealing with souls who pass through the hospital. We'll see if it works ❤
And my mom’s work in a nursing facility, there was a nurse that stated a patient was “ceasing of breathing,” since nurses cannot legally state, people is dead. Still in the nursing facility with long-term care, it’s not uncommon for people to pass. It would be difficult to ask for a doctor to be page to come out any time that happens, so they often take the nurse’s word for it. Preparing for the funeral home, some nursing assistance went into the room. The guy opened his eyes wide open and said, “Hello, ladies.” Turns out the nurse was wrong.
The nurse pronounced my dad dead and his Fitbit showed he had a heartbeat for over four more hours.!!! I can’t find anybody that wants to talk about this. 😢
I guess I should clarify. Death exams are done on every patient. I don't know about human medicine, but on animals a death second is required. A death second is a second person to confirm death. I would hope humans have that same level of care and require a second. Breath, heart rate and blood pressure zero. Sometimes vagus response.
The resident yelled into the face of my aunt as part of the death check. It was about 20 hours after her breathing tube had been removed. Funniest thing ever. I almost hit the floor laughing so hard.
The mom of a girl I used to know told me a few stories about people dying. The creepiest was about a woman that was told she was dead so a nurse went to her room when suddenly the alarm bell in her room sounded. The girl rushes into the room to find the woman sitting upright in her bed, with her hand on the alarm button, looking at the girl. The nurse runs off to get a few doctors and when they come back the woman is laying flat on the bed, dead as one can be. The nurse was new iirc so that was probably on hell of an experience.
I am a retired Medic, the ending of this story is extremly unfullfilling, and if there is a creepy part to the story, it surely was not told in any way what so ever....
Um... if its a DNR or a suspected normal death cause, 2 registered nurses could confirm death in the hospital I worked for in Ky. We both check signs of life respectively and if we confirm the patient has died, we sign a death form at bedside in front of each other, inform the patients treating hospitalist Dr and charge nurse who informs the house nurse and bed booking. We then inform next of kin if they were not already there and complete the death check list like calling KODA, funeral Home, Chaplin for family and do whatever care to the body as needed or wanted by family or funeral home.
RN here. One night as I was receiving report, I was told a patient had passed, everything had been done, and we were waiting on the funeral home to pick up the body. The family was in the room as I walked by. The patient's wife walked out and asked me, "It's normal for them to take breaths after they pass, right?" I immediately entered the room, and noted the patient was indeed breathing and had a pulse. I replaced the non-rebreather mask, set it to 15 L/min as it had been the night before, notified the doctor, and called the funeral home to let them know they didn't need to come out. I called the nurse I had received report from. She told me she called the doctor because the patient was not doing well. When the doctor came, he pronounced the patient dead. The nurse mentioned the patient's heart was still beating on the monitor. The doctor told her, "It'll stop soon," His family thought it was a miracle when I told them he was alive. I was livid with the doctor as this man's oxygen had not been on him for 4+ hours. And can you imagine if the funeral home had actually shown up???
Apparently though even with no heartbeat wait or vice versa a friend of mine I think had wasn't breathing but heart kept beating? Which I still don't understand.
I'm a pharmacy technician. Night shift, doing OR cart restock in the middle of the night for morning surgery. not a person in sight, just me restocking. and i hear the entrance door open, which is sensor activated. Got so scared I turn on stereo system in OR full blast and keep on doing what I do. This is just one of the story. I go thru this one or two time a week. It's really fun.
I get why death exams are essential. The amount of people buried alive in the past due to quick body disposal was so prevalent that people felt the need to have bells on strings or hollow pipes leading to coffins in the event it happened so the "deceased" could ring or holler to be unburied. To the point that it still has come close to happening even today in our current modern era. The article regarding the disabled young lady that was pronounced deceased not long ago, only to be realized she was still alive when they were close to embalming her. So yeah. Scary stuff and I get it. Death exams probably keep those number waaaay lower than what they otherwise would be.
Wait, were they BOTH dead?! I was doing bedside care for an actively dying patient, stepped out to give the family alone time while also checking on another resident across the hall. As i walked out, it got freezing cold & oddly quiet for a memory care facility. The patient I went to check on was NOT "expected" to pass, but took her last breath as i entered the room. I called for the charge nurse & went back to the actual hospice patient. The family said that she had taken her last breath as i was exiting the room to give them privacy. That day has almost haunted me & is rarely believed. To top that off, within one hour, we had another patient pass, somewhat expectedly, as "death's come in threes" & he was our next most advanced Alzheimer's patient & was beginning to lose all motor function, swallowing ability, etc. I have always been very comfortable in taking care of the dead and dying, but that day wasn't my best for mental health, to be sure. Life is SO fleeting. And our souls absolutely YEARN to go home when our lesson has been learned for this current experience of life. And, remarkably, deaths DO seem to always happen in threes. But rarely in the same location when it comes to natural deaths (ie not war, mass shootings, catastrophe, etc.) Bizarre, really.
Either it was coincidentally that there was another patient, room 424, who also died; OR the Resident wasn’t qualified to correctly perform a death exam.
This reminds me of a horrible situation which I personally encountered when I was the Night Supervisor at a long-term Psychiatric Facility. We took the "worst-of-the-worst" patients who weren't placeable anywhere else, from a 5 state region. Sadly, that night we had a failing patient with a private duty Hospice Nurse. During my shift the Hospice Nurse came to me and asked me to "pronounce" the patient's death. (At night, the Supervisor would "pronounce" the patient, and then the doctor would finish "signing off" on the death on the day shift.) Well, I entered the room, and the family were crying, and holding one another. My heart truly was breaking for each one of them. So I put my stethoscope on the patient's chest, and he had a heartbeat as good as mine, and was breathing!!! 😯😳 I quickly pulled the Hospice Nurse out of the room and asked her why on earth she had told the family and me that he was dead, and expected me to "pronounce" his death??!! I will NEVER forget her response: "M'am, it's the end of my shift, and I have to leave." 😮😢😟 I told her to leave, and that I never wanted to see her again in our facility!!! Then I had to go back into the room to tell the family that she was incorrect, and that the patient wasn't deceased. I called that nurse's boss and told her what had happened, and sternly ordered that that nurse was NEVER to set foot in our facility ever again!!! When morning came, I told our Director, and knowing him, I'm certain that he had some rather firm words to say to the agency as well.
Back in the olden days before modern medicine we would even have people who would pay to have a rope connected from the coffin to a bell on the surface, so if someone revived after being buried, they could just ring the bell so that people could dig them back up.
My grandpa got pneumonia. He was on a BiPAP machine for several days. He kept confirming that he wanted to keep trying to fight, but if his heart stops to not revive him. In the middle of the night, he flatlines. Nurse comes in to begin removing the tubes and IVs. As soon as he begins pulling the breathing tube from the BiPAP machine out, my grandpa coughs and his heart monitor starts beeping again. My last cousin was able to come see him that day because he came back. Then he passed the next night. He actually got to say goodbye to all his kids and grandkids before he passed.
One crazy story was the New York clerk for the Supreme Court that was ax murdered by his son, lost the top part of his head, arose the next morning via brain stem activity and got the paper from the front door and sat down at the kitchen table and finally succumbed to his wounds. He had no top of his head. The wife was also bludgeoned but lived and thinks her guilty son is innocent
Reading about gravediggers in grays anatomi. In the 18 hundreads there was a huge need for Bodils to examine, so there was an industry 4 provideing Bodils... very halloweeny story
As another commenter stated, the second death shouldn’t have gone unnoticed. They’re monitored by machines and nurses, so for a 2nd person to quietly die while they wait for the Doctor to examine the first, it’s a little bizarre.
@@Chemeleon15 not really, they're only monitored in the icu or with telemetry if they have a heart condition. In a hospice where they have a dnr there's little need to monitor, and given the time of the day, nurses can check on patients more rarely than usual. Sure it's unusual to have someone unexpectedly die next door at the same time as someone else, but I can think of plenty situations where people have the immediate death process happen quick enough to not be detected
